Tetzlaff

IMO the best thing was when Tuvok and Neelix merged to a new person during a teleporter accident. Tuvix wasn't as boring and stiff as Tuvok and not as annoying and silly as Neelix, he was actually likeable. But then they killed him again. The justification for this move didn't convince me either.

My younger brother is your age and he was actually the one who brought the copied floppy disks home and showed me Doom on our PC :)

Also around 1994, when I was 18 or 19.

If I remember it right, the Viavga series of maps had the purpose to test graphic cards, so they were quite detailed. I think I played one of the Doom 3 viavga maps, but it wasn't that memorable. There were also viavga maps for Quake 3: Arena, they also looked nice but didnt have the best gameplay. I found one of them here: https://gamebanana.com/mods/138613 Lots of light map textures, but not exactly great looking either. Moddb link Viavga Doom 3

Says who? I thought they talk gibberish and mostly unarticulated moans and groans.

I really enjoyed Chrome. I don't think it was that obscure around here (Germany), as well as the other Eastern European FPS from that time, like Chaser, Kreed and so on. Maybe they had more marketing and distribution in Europe than in the US? Chrome had many relatively open outdoor maps, you could use vehicles, use stealth tactics if you wanted. In some missions stealth was obligatory, when you had to infiltrade a base. It had an inventory system and you could loot the bodies of fallen enemies, or search crates: This added some inventory management and made exploring your environment rewarding. I always like that. For me Chrome was the better Unreal 2 (2003). I hated Unreal 2 for it's shallowness and extremely restrictive, linear game design. Chrome had a similar premise like Unreal 2: You were a mercenary with an attractive crew mate in a little spaceship, taking missions on different planets. It wasn't as visually impressive as Unreal 2 but the gameplay was more fun.

Fragging Free combines Doom 3 with more arcade-like, frantic gameplay. Comes with it's own campaign, many new monsters, some new weapons, special abilities and so on. Can also be played with the normal camapiagn and RoE.

That Daisy the pet bunny thing receives way too much attention since Doom 2016/Eternal. It was just a little joke in original Doom.

Interesting question, I would think teenagers and young adults as main target audience as well. Definitely not younger children.

Maybe not really bizarre, but unusual: Save Gems in Daikatana. To save your progress, you had to use one out of a small number of Save Gem items that where scattered around the level. I liked it because I like exploring, and Save Gems added a new class of worthwile items you could go looking for. It also prevented save scumming. But everyone else seemed to hate it.

You could overlap the meshes a bit to avoid gaps like that.

That was just the dialogue, the rest is all non-stop action!

The Soul Cube. It's not so much a weapon, more like an enhancement / portable power-up. I like the alien meets art deco design, the story behind it, and it can create tension when coupled with sparse health item distribution.

This is an interesting game. Mangled Eye Studios team leader Kiltron was level designer at Ritual Entertainment, but he was also active in the Quake3/Doom3 modding scene. The Quake 2: Lost Marine mod for Doom 3 was another project of him. Dark Salvation feels like a SP Quake 3 Arena game with a juvenile gothic twist. It has some cool looking hellish environments and monsters. An annoying point were the potentially deadly platforming elements in the game. It's very unforgiving because (due to it's Q3A roots) there is practically no saving system in the game - you only can save at the start of each level, so you have to start all over when you fall into lava or into a death pit. Which happened more often to me than death through an enemies hand... There was some real-life tragedy connected to the game. The girl who modelled for and voiced the game's supernatural goth girl protagonist died in a car accident just before Dark Salvation was released.

I guessed so. Maybe you can redo the video some day with in-game footage to illustrate your points. I know it would be a lot of work but I think it would be worth it.

In Q3A Doom's favorite weapon is the railgun, despite being an original Quake 2 weapon. Interesting compilation of facts in your video. Though having to watch that shaky cam aimlessly wandering through swamps was kind of disconcerting and disjointed...

Nomen est omen... Obscura: The Shadow Blade, released 2005, developed by Sarbakan (Canada) I only played the demo of this Action-Adventure. It's set in 16th century Venice and has a slightly cartoon-like visual style, a bit reminiscent of anime but not quite. Eerie music and dream-like environments. As far as I remember it featured some very basic Hack&Slay gameplay.

Not at all. Moorhuhn in that time in Germany was the one videogame every casual gamer knew and every "real" gamer ignored.

I like the look of the heads. One strange thing all these models have in common is that the torso is too tall and the arms too short in relation.

I remember seeing full-page ads for Dark Reign 2 in PC gaming magazines in that time and thought it looked interesting. But I only occassionally played RTS so I missed that one. Looks good in that video, I like that dystopian scifi world they have there.

Here's a really weird one: Terminal Machine, release 2003, developer Cold Shock Studios, publisher Asylum Games (Germany), genre FPS. This FPS only consists of three levels the size of an avarage Quake level. Visuals and even architectural style resemble Quake 2 with a dystopian vibe dominated by dark greys and green. The soundtrack of the first level sounds like a bootleg record from some artsy noise performance. Some ripped sounds from Quake 3 Arena are used for enemies and environment. Only 2 enemy types (?). The leveldesign of the first map is actually not bad, relatively open layout where you have to locate switches that eventually activate a teleporter to exit the level. Gameplay is terribly janky and bugged. Could'nt play following levels because game crashed. Cover artwork and name should probably suggest a misleading connection to the Terminator franchise. Youtube playthrough: I couldn't find any info on the developer Cold Shock Studios, but Asylum Games seems to have specialised on low-budget video games. @Redneckerz: Yeah, I remember encountering some of those Russian homebrew products in that time period. "Soldier Of Empire" looks interesting.

Rat Hunter, an FPS by Secret Sign, released 2006. Your character is supposed to be a journalist visiting dangerous places on various planets, encountering alien monsters, futuristic soldiers and cyborgs. It's an okay old-schoolish FPS with by the numbers gameplay, sometimes feels a bit bland. Developer Secret Sign released space shooter StarCalibur prior to that. I have no further information about them and don't even know if they were Russian or Ukrainian. Publisher was Russobit-M. Ubersoldier is one of the better known Return to Castle Wolfenstein clones. Just because it isn't an AA title doesn't mean it's obscure.

Interesting, I didn't knew that. Just read the entry on the Duke Nukem wiki. Do you know if they used the assets from the Duke project because it happened to fit in their concept for Vivisector, or was the whole game designed in the first place to make use of those older assets? When playing Vivisector it didn't seem thematically wild or inconsistent to me. Basically just Island of Dr Moreau with a cyborg twist.

What do you mean by Duke Nukem game? I don't see any connection. Vivisector is losely based on The Island of Doctor Moreau. Ukrainian developer Action Forms also did Chasm: The Rift in the 1990s. I really enjoyed the latter half of Vivisector. The first half consists mainly of Serious Sam style arena battles and isn't that good, but the game significantly improves after that. I really liked the atmosphere and story in Harbinger. Though I never actually finished the game. I have to reaplay it some time.

Cool, I like crates!