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infosec sorceress

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hikari-no-yume
@hikari-no-yume

i finally found an old game i played as a child and i swear to god you will never guess what i found inside

okay so, i finally found the DOS FPS game i'd played the demo of as a kid!!! i could remember it being in 3D, with configurable sound card options, a kind of sci-fi รฆsthetic, some outdoor sections with brown being the predominant colour, but also prominant use of electric blue...

based on those details i knew it had to be from the mid-to-late 90's. sure enough, it's Domination (1998), apparently also known Rex Blade: The Battle Begins.

screenshot of Domination (1998) running in DOSBox. a typical 2.5D scene from that era of DOS gaming: grainy pixelly textures, straight walls and floors, a gun rendered as a sprite

playing it now, i understand why I didn't keep playing: it sucks.

the reason i was reminded of it and wanted to find it again today is that i remembered the sound card options, and wondered if it had General MIDI i could try out with my new (old) MIDI module. sure enough, it has both FM synthesis and MIDI, and both OSTs suck. lmao.

BUT.

one neat thing about Domination is that there's a "terminal" in the game, that you can walk up to. and it's an actual terminal! it looks like an Apple II, but it has CLS, DIR, HELP, SYSTEM, VER, and more.

screenshot of Domination (1998) running in DOSBox. a listing of commands available in the terminal: CLS, DIR, EXIT, HELP, VER, SYSTEM, STARBLAZER, LOGS, LIB, REX++. the terminal resembles the Apple II DOS with the closing square bracket used as the prompt character.

but then i see REX++ and wonder what it does. i figure that, considering the game's main character is named Rex Blade, it might unlock something.

but no. it's... an honest-to-god FULLY FEATURED PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE????

screenshot of Domination (1998) running in DOSBox. the program REX++ is running inside the in-game terminal and an example program that plots random points on the screen and prints "I am the man!" is shown.

this is one of SEVERAL examples. yeah, you can actually run it:

screenshot of Domination (1998) running in DOSBox. the output of running an example program that plots many random-colour dots on the screen and prints "I am the man!".

and yes i did of course test whether you can edit the example and run arbitrary code, in case for some reason it's not a real interpreter. and yes, you can.

what. what!!!!!

i must emphasise: as far as i can tell this is a run-of-the-mill 3D shooty game. it's not even a fucking action RPG. this is not a developer console, it's literally an in-game item. what the fuck is this doing here. did they spend all the development effort on the toy programming language rather than the game

also. after playing with it, it dawned on me...

while this doesn't seem to be compatible with REXX, it must be named after it or its predecessor REX.

DID THEY NAME THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THE GAME AFTER THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

this is just the deepest nerd shit and i can only respect it. shame about the game

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in reply to @hikari-no-yume's post:

Snarboo
@Snarboo

IIRC, yes it is!

It amuses me that this turned up on my timeline, because I think about this game and its fully featured programming language every few years. Even as a child, my mind was blown that a game could do that, especially since the game it was embedded in sucks serious ass. Clearly, that effort might have been better spent on just making a simple construction kit rather than a Wolf 3D clone in 1996.

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