Chu Chu Rocket

Possibly one of the greatest gaming achievements in console gaming and for the Dreamcast initially, Chu-Chu Rocket is one of the forerunners for online gaming that the Dreamcast and Sega pioneered and was the first game with major popularity and online support through consoles. (Of course we're already enjoying Quake and Quake World on our 56K modems, fast back then and a death sentence these days)

The premise is simple. Get mice into rocket. Get more mice than your opponent to win. Avoid cats. I really cannot make it any simpler than perhaps Mice good, Cats evil, Save mice. It's a wonderfully simple little game but like a lot of party games and multiplayer games, it gets awkward, complicated and rage inducing, fast! And fast too.

You get to control a cursor, the same colour as your rocket and you can place down onto a board, up to 3 arrows that will guide the mice (and cats) along routes until they hit a wall, hit a rocket or hit another arrow. You will guide them from their generators and into a rocket upon which you score points. When you lay down a 4th arrow, the first one will vanish. Arrows also vanish after a short while and fade out which means you'll have to lay down more arrows... if you can. Because at the same time, some little sneaky bastard AI or other Player, is going to be laying down THEIR arrows and trying to get mice into THEIR rockets. (Or the really shit-bastard-gitbags will be guiding the cats into your rocket and you lose a 3rd of all mice in there). So now we see where a) the challenge and b) the added appeal comes into play.

Each mouse is worth a point, Gold mice are worth 50 and pink mice spin the roulette wheel. This is the games way of determining that all you’ve set up is going to be for nothing and there’s nothing left you’re going to be able to do to prevent the madness and chaos that is the random effect. This can be from anything like everyone else gets an immediate cat to the rocket or someone gets a vacuum effect for WAVES of mice into their rocket. It could also be an immediate game of Change Places and now you're where player Yellow was and they're where player Red is now. It could also be all the arrows are removed while the game freezes for a moment, or it's just PURE MICE for about 30 seconds or the more destructive and vile cats only for about 30 seconds and then all arrows will be quickly rearrange to keep things OUT of their rockets.

The game comes into its own when 2-4 human players are trying to stitch each other up and get the monopoly on the mice from the generators while trying to negate the cats and send them into each other’s bases. While playing against the AI is an entertaining prospect for a while, it lacks the immediacy of the human-factor which pits mind against mind rather than mind against occasionally malfunctioning algorithm and false Artificial Intelligence, even the computer will make mistakes and you can't help but think that you're still not up against a good attempt at a human, but rather you're against a bad attempt at a computer.

But this is just one mode of the game.

You can play solo all vs. all, or in teams. You can choose from a great many layouts or make your own, play offline or online against other humans or play against the AI/People-within-punching-distance in your own living room with some half-eaten pizzas strewn around the place.

Other features include puzzles where you'll have to save all the pre-determined mice without losing any while using a specific number and set up of arrows. Or you can make your own puzzles, though there's plenty already on the game and in most cases with the right set-up, you can download more of the fiendish little buggers. Though the menu should be listed as "Would you like to download potentially even more pain and suffering than you've already been through?" and for uploading puzzles "Click here to make the rest of the world suffer your bullshit", but instead the game remains nice and colourful and pleasant about everything. Which is probably for the best. There's no gore here, just a fading mouse with a little halo when it touches a cat (that includes it running into the back of the cat). So it's all family friendly and happy cutesy game of tag between mice and cats with arrows and rockets thrown in for fun's sake.

And yet, every game I've seen played has some of the most coarse and abusive language known to mankind, I've seen people change languages to swear at others, dipping into Spanish and French (international friends... what can you do...) because they get so caught up in the furious paced action and "fun" that they transcend speaking in one language and drop back into their own.

This game can really drag you along on a wild madness if you're gaming against other people, especially on levels where there's not much space between your rocket and the generators and there's only enough space for 3 arrows and 12 of them can be placed at once on the level, that's when the anger and annoyance kicks in and long standing friends become bitter rivals, brother and sister turn upon each other and the end of days is soon upon us with family pitted against family in pockets of civil unrest.

So yes, this game is designed to bring about the apocalypse, but at least it does it in a very cute, playable and colourful manner. If you see someone spray painting cats orange, you know to start building rockets.

Quake

If Doom is the recognised Great Granddaddy of the First Person Shooter genre, then Quake is the Grandfather of 3D First Person Shooters. Not that pseudo 3D perception we'd been given with Doom, Duke, and any BUILD game for that matter, or indeed the Marathon series of games. But a TRUE, actual 3D set of architecture, 3D models for virtually everything from weapons to pickups and so on. Quake holds the most recognised crown for it and paved the way for the games like Unreal, Half-Life and so on.

Quake still holds true to the Doom formula, as one might expect of ID software, in which players get from point a, to point b, in an as "alive" state as possible, preferably with as many guns and as much ammo as one can acquire. What functions slightly differently is that the game gives you a 3D run down of the difficulties (Easy, Normal, Hard... and nightmare if you can find it) then you may select which of the 4 episodes you wish to begin, battle your way through the levels, kill the end enemies and exit with the rune. Once you've gained all 4 runes, you'll see the end level open up and from there you combat the final boss that has caused the situation in the first place resulting in one-lone-hero syndrome.

Sort of...

Let's start with the positives. Bearing in mind I'm taking a look at the original Quake with no additions, mods, enhancements or other such little situational changes (like using OpenGL etc.).

The game is fast, even on low end machines for the time, the optimisation of the code is impressive nonetheless for the game and even while showing levels in some of the most outstanding shades of brown imaginable, (seriously... almost everything is brown, perhaps something to be not-so-proud of for the future of gaming, turning everything "realistic" brown) the character's movement in and around the game is often very fluid and rather quick, which is taken to extremes in the speed runs of the game.

Enemy AI is little more than the doom system with opponents often taking the most direct route to you and moving back and forth a little if they cannot, animations are clunky but we're talking of a game that would have hand-designed these animations and models rather than using 3D scanners or body mapping for motion. There's no ragdoll but that never came into the fore until after Quake 3, so there's no point slagging off the game on that regard. However it would be nice to have enemies that weren't outfoxed by a brick wall and a corner.

Enemy variation is the usual mixed bag we've come to expect from ID software, though less varied as in Doom 2. There's your zombie marines with shotguns, zombie doggies, zombie heavy marines with lasers (a weapon you never get by the way) for the modern levels before you hit the time portals in each episode and then the game shows its roots as having started as a Dungeons and Dragons design. You'll be warped to castles and such where knights with swords, bigger knights with fire launching swords, magical worms that spit acid (I've not a clue what it's supposed to look like), zombies that can't be killed and need to be blown up, Fiends which resemble manic dogs with scythe arms and severe blood-mouth, tar-babies that blow up, ogres with chainsaws and grenades (the fuck???) and later Vores and Shamblers that are the more monstrous creatures that fire homing explosives and lightning respectively, often taking position in levels as a sort of boss creature.

This is where the game falls a little flat. The demo/shareware version is the first episode alone, sporting a good number of levels, multiple distinct enemies including even the shamblers (giant white yeti looking things that shoot lightning) and a boss creature that is part puzzle, part battle which rises out of lava, throws lava at you, and then is destroyed in lava.

You encounter nothing like that boss ever again; even the last boss is just a large BLOB with tentacles suspended above it that does NOTHING. Seriously, I've seen dead people offer more of a threat than this creature. While yes, it does have an army of the more nasty enemies to battle while you get to it, the actual fight with it is a cut scene if you time your jump through the teleporter at the right moment. After seeing the first boss of the first episode you cannot help but wonder did ID run out of time while making this and as such had to fudge the last boss? And lose making any other bosses too? It's rather inconsistent within the games (especially as there's videos of people beating the game in 100% kills, on the hardest mode, within 20minutes) you won't get to see anything like it again and it sticks out as such a variation from the norm, you can't help but wonder why it's not repeated or other such creatures had not been implemented.

Perhaps more a case of "Our demo is excellent, the rest we threw together"

Weaponry within the game is a fairly standard set up. Axes for the melee, shotguns of both single and double barrel flavours, nail guns of the dual and quad variety take place for the machinegun class. Grenade launchers for that dynamic angle of attacking, rocket launchers for the direct method and the lightning gun that sprays bolts in a constant, high-damage, stream. (Do NOT use it underwater, unless invincible). 8 weapons all in all and fairly consistent with ID for the variety. So nothing really adventurous there and nothing that packs the "wow" factor of a BFG (later Quake games however.... mmm 10k).

Various power ups will augment damage, boost health/armour or turn one invisible or even make one anti-god like (666 health, ho ho ho such humour), though usually found in places that they HAVE to be used or hidden so well nobody will find them.

Quake also brings to the fore, underwater swimming! This really gives you freedom of movement, screws up your resolution and makes it hard to see what you’re doing and lets you sink slowly if you just “remain” there. Drowning takes place shortly after and all guns work underwater, especially the lightning gun.

That pretty much is quake. Save for one final aspect of the game, the multiplayer.

There's the co-operative model for people that like to run through the game with infinite respawns while they and their barely-recognisably-human models attack all manner of enemies and even each other if they put the wrong friendly-fire setting on, with sometimes more enemies in places and the usual situation we've come to expect in Doom. And then there's the death match option, which is one of the most engrossing and fast paced action fests I've seen in a death match game in a very long time.

Every level can be used as a death match while also there are 6 specifically designed levels just for the death match experience ranging from the claustrophobic first level with a few key weapons and really for 2-4 players to the bigger and more deadly trap filled levels, one level that is more a tower of combat with height and floors playing more of a key role. The crown goes to level 5 and to a lesser extent, level 6 as the epitome of death match experience, particularly for groups of 4-16. The shotgun fires rapidly enough to cause a threat but the bigger weapons will slaughter people left and right.

This does however lead to an imbalance of a situation where someone gets the rocket launcher and goes ape-shit mental. It's hard to take someone down with one of those unless you have one of those or gang up on them. When a player is killed, they drop a pack holding ALL their ammo and the weapon they had selected, so it's possible to get their guns off them. This does however mean that someone will be running around with full ammo most of the time as the cumulative effect of picking up ammo drops means they'll hold all the ammo for all the weapons bar the one they were using at the time.

This however, is entirely negated if their ammo pack falls into lava or into a place nobody can get to. Leaving everyone to start their ammo collection over once again. There is a high level of thrill to running a corner, ending up behind someone and giving them both barrels in the back to launch them off the edge, dead, into some lava before running off to find your next victim. Sadly, spawning in front of someone who has a rocket launcher will leave you looking like a shower of blood pissing from every fissure and crack an explosion can give you. But we're still talking in an age of teething and few games had that mercy invincibility for freshly-spawned players.

The game is certainly worth looking into for those that want to relive the older, simpler, more FUN and faster paced games, or those that want to know where the lofty heights of Battlefield 53, Crysis 12 and even Quake 12 and Doom 72: Even more demons, came from and you can't do much better than Quake in that regard.

Incidentally, the Dope Fish lives!