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Let me tell you a story...
A really long time ago, my dad came home carrying a little plastic box full of floppy disks and diskettes — it was mostly the kind of stuff you'd expect a 30-something-year-old office worker to be hoarding (spreadsheet programs, word processors, a rather amusing copy of an early graphic design software...), but there were also some games in there.
And among them was one that stood head and shoulders above the rest: Wolfenstein 3D.
I almost choked on my chocolate milk right then and there.
What WAS this thing? Why did it look so cool? Was that a gun? And where in the world was my character? Don't tell me it was the one holding said gun...
For someone whose entire definition of "Nirvana" was playing 8-bit platformers like the original Super Mario Bros. and MegaDrive classics like Sonic the Hedgehog over at my best friend's house, this was nothing short of shocking... And the most earth-shattering thing was the fact that me and my sister were allowed to play it.
We thought dad had gone completely crazy, that those damn rows and columns had finally rotted his brain — this was a properly violent game, and we were just given permission to go through it, murdering anything that stood in our path while real human beings (and dogs!) fell to our bullets over and over again.
My sister and I were so mesmerized by it that we even took to hotly debating what the fucking thing was called... And I'm not even kidding.
She insisted (accurately, but I wasn't about to give her the satisfaction) that the game was called Wolfenstein THREE-DEE, while I just called it "3" and "D" separately. It was peak nonsense, but I actually credit it with permanently drilling the game into my mind, a fact I'd come to really appreciate later on.
Fast forward a few years and little me is finally allowed onto the World Wide Web, a digital world I didn't even begin to understand and that would eventually claim the life of our family computer as me and my sister rapid-fire clicked on every link under the sun as they promised us the moon and the stars above.
But before we murdered it in cold blood, we actually got some real mileage out of it.
You see, my best friend had been an early adopter of the internet phenomenon and had told me that you could even get full games on there, a concept that really messed with my perception of reality as a dumb fuck who had to either save up or beg to get new things to play.
Unlike my friend, however, I wasn't interested in (or even really capable of) downloading the hottest new games that were making the collective masses swoon — there was no Quake III Arena for me, nor did I have any hope of getting GTA III onto my aging PC... But that was okay, for what I really wanted to do was revisit a ghost from the past.
Yes, I immediately began my search for Wolfenstein 3D, the ancient object of my kiddie fascination.
This was surprisingly challenging to accomplish (not in the least because I sucked at Yahoo-ing my searches), and I ended up on an Argentinian abandonware site after a few weeks of on-and-off searching, one that effectively carried the game.
Playing this thing again was like visiting a friend after one of you had moved away and then discovering that you were still in a groove.
It was a perfect world, one that even validated my ancient computer — the source of so much of my schoolyard shame — because I had, by that point, spent a lot of time reading endless posts about people having trouble with DOSBox, a process my dinosaur machine could handle automatically.
And then came the big revelation in the form of a reply to one of my topics gushing about the game:
"OG is great, but have you tried the Jaguar version?"
The FUCK was a Jaguar?
(I'm gonna assume y'all know what the Atari Jaguar is for the sake of not murdering my own fingers any more than necessary — typing this out on a phone has been nothing short of torture).
Of course, emulating the Atari Jaguar was beyond the realm and scope of reality even at the time but, just like what I had done all those years earlier, I saved the name for later, etching it somewhere deep in my skull to hopefully revisit it somewhere down the line.
Well... It turns out that "somewhere down the line" was 19 years later.
Yes, I have finally played this thing and solved the mystery for myself... Was that random poster from decades ago right? Was this the definitive version of one of the best games ever made?
Yes.
Not only is it one of the smoothest experiences for ANY console FPS of the time (seriously, I challenge you to find any that runs better, port or not), but it's also a clear improvement: they give you a map, more weapons, a better use for treasure, splash damage, enemies that are finally not just funny hitscanners... and it was ported over by id Software themselves, so there were no weird "interpretation" issues here — this is not the declawed SNES version, no, this is great.
And if the Jaguar can do this one so much justice, maybe the system truly is underrated and deserving of a second look... Would other classics like Doom and Cannon Fodder deliver as well? I don't know, but I'm eager to find out!
A really long time ago, my dad came home carrying a little plastic box full of floppy disks and diskettes — it was mostly the kind of stuff you'd expect a 30-something-year-old office worker to be hoarding (spreadsheet programs, word processors, a rather amusing copy of an early graphic design software...), but there were also some games in there.
And among them was one that stood head and shoulders above the rest: Wolfenstein 3D.
I almost choked on my chocolate milk right then and there.
What WAS this thing? Why did it look so cool? Was that a gun? And where in the world was my character? Don't tell me it was the one holding said gun...
For someone whose entire definition of "Nirvana" was playing 8-bit platformers like the original Super Mario Bros. and MegaDrive classics like Sonic the Hedgehog over at my best friend's house, this was nothing short of shocking... And the most earth-shattering thing was the fact that me and my sister were allowed to play it.
We thought dad had gone completely crazy, that those damn rows and columns had finally rotted his brain — this was a properly violent game, and we were just given permission to go through it, murdering anything that stood in our path while real human beings (and dogs!) fell to our bullets over and over again.
My sister and I were so mesmerized by it that we even took to hotly debating what the fucking thing was called... And I'm not even kidding.
She insisted (accurately, but I wasn't about to give her the satisfaction) that the game was called Wolfenstein THREE-DEE, while I just called it "3" and "D" separately. It was peak nonsense, but I actually credit it with permanently drilling the game into my mind, a fact I'd come to really appreciate later on.
Fast forward a few years and little me is finally allowed onto the World Wide Web, a digital world I didn't even begin to understand and that would eventually claim the life of our family computer as me and my sister rapid-fire clicked on every link under the sun as they promised us the moon and the stars above.
But before we murdered it in cold blood, we actually got some real mileage out of it.
You see, my best friend had been an early adopter of the internet phenomenon and had told me that you could even get full games on there, a concept that really messed with my perception of reality as a dumb fuck who had to either save up or beg to get new things to play.
Unlike my friend, however, I wasn't interested in (or even really capable of) downloading the hottest new games that were making the collective masses swoon — there was no Quake III Arena for me, nor did I have any hope of getting GTA III onto my aging PC... But that was okay, for what I really wanted to do was revisit a ghost from the past.
Yes, I immediately began my search for Wolfenstein 3D, the ancient object of my kiddie fascination.
This was surprisingly challenging to accomplish (not in the least because I sucked at Yahoo-ing my searches), and I ended up on an Argentinian abandonware site after a few weeks of on-and-off searching, one that effectively carried the game.
Playing this thing again was like visiting a friend after one of you had moved away and then discovering that you were still in a groove.
It was a perfect world, one that even validated my ancient computer — the source of so much of my schoolyard shame — because I had, by that point, spent a lot of time reading endless posts about people having trouble with DOSBox, a process my dinosaur machine could handle automatically.
And then came the big revelation in the form of a reply to one of my topics gushing about the game:
"OG is great, but have you tried the Jaguar version?"
The FUCK was a Jaguar?
(I'm gonna assume y'all know what the Atari Jaguar is for the sake of not murdering my own fingers any more than necessary — typing this out on a phone has been nothing short of torture).
Of course, emulating the Atari Jaguar was beyond the realm and scope of reality even at the time but, just like what I had done all those years earlier, I saved the name for later, etching it somewhere deep in my skull to hopefully revisit it somewhere down the line.
Well... It turns out that "somewhere down the line" was 19 years later.
Yes, I have finally played this thing and solved the mystery for myself... Was that random poster from decades ago right? Was this the definitive version of one of the best games ever made?
Yes.
Not only is it one of the smoothest experiences for ANY console FPS of the time (seriously, I challenge you to find any that runs better, port or not), but it's also a clear improvement: they give you a map, more weapons, a better use for treasure, splash damage, enemies that are finally not just funny hitscanners... and it was ported over by id Software themselves, so there were no weird "interpretation" issues here — this is not the declawed SNES version, no, this is great.
And if the Jaguar can do this one so much justice, maybe the system truly is underrated and deserving of a second look... Would other classics like Doom and Cannon Fodder deliver as well? I don't know, but I'm eager to find out!
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