hikari-no-yume
@hikari-no-yume

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 æsthetic, 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.


hikari-no-yume
@hikari-no-yume

update! i've recorded an extensive video of the thing that the post above is about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8oECLUXzs


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

back in this era, things like lua didn't exist, so games regularly shipped with completely bespoke scripting languages in order to implement things like "pick up two objects and press a button in order to open a door." all of them would have been interpreted, so it would not surprise me if the devs included this either as a pure Bit (hey, we wrote it, why not let people play with it) or as a disguised debug tool for testing interpretation inside the game itself rather than in isolation. to wit, I wonder if it could affect the world if you knew the right incantations.

EDIT: having reviewed the game files I'm gonna go with "nah." I think @hikari-no-yume is right: it's just a toy.

I'm not sure if the game engine was bespoke or not. This came out much later than I realized (1998!!!!!) and I see references to "GameVision" in the strings. Could still be scratchmade, but... ehhhhhhh.


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

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.

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

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post: