Looking Glass Technologies are probably best known for their Ultima Underworld series of games, but this 1996 tactical shooter from them is also a retro-gaming classic.
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri is a first-person, futuristic ‘combat suit’ type action game with an interesting mix of styles.
The Atari 800 version of Rescue On Fractalus was released in 1984 and was the first version available. It was a critical success and drew quite a lot of attention to Atari 8-bit home computers (jealous Commodore 64 owners had to wait almost a year before they got a conversion).
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II – as the title says – is a direct sequel to the Star Wars-based shooter, Dark Forces. It was published by LucasArts in 1997.
Dark Forces is LucasArts‘ attempt at Doom, with a Star Wars make-over. It was first released in 1995 for MS-DOS PCs.
Looking at it now: it hasn’t aged too well, although it’s still fun to play if you get the controls set up correctly.
This 2002 sequel to Serious Sam is very similar to the first game. The first level even has the same monsters, but does blast through them quickly to get to the new stuff. And there is quite a bit of new stuff. Weapons, environments, enemies, bosses, et cetera.
As ‘generic’ first-person shooters go, Serious Sam is up there with the best of them.
And – let’s face it – the market is flooded with generic first-person shooters…
Monolith‘s 1997 shooter – Blood – is a first-person satire of every horror movie you ever saw, and also a few that you probably didn’t.
Ray Tobey‘s exciting first-person air combat game, Sky Fox, was first released on the Apple II in 1984, then converted to other systems by Electronic Arts in 1985.
A modern remake of the classic 3D Realms shooter is a great idea – the original adventures of Lo Wang (the lead character in the Shadow Warrior games, and the character you play in this) were a lot of fun.
Doom was good, but Quake – for me – was where id Software really broke the First-Person Shooter mould, with a game far ahead of anything else at the time – even their own games…
