Boomer shooters are seeing quite the renaissance lately and we are all here for it. Back in the 90s when kids were playing Mario and Sonic, we were on our clunky office PCs playing shooters that could not be done on those little kid’s machines.
It’s great to see the genre make a comeback! So, we figured now would be a great time to go back to the past (insert AVGN line here) and tell you young folk about a couple of classic boomer shooters that time nearly forgot all about. Maybe that’s for a good reason, but let’s get to the list and find out!
- . William Shatner’s TekWar
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William Shatner’s TekWar from Capstone Software, the masters of not knowing how to make the famed Build Engine work well, is a game that has major little brother syndrome. You see the big boys doing something great and you simply try and copy what they are doing without understanding what makes the genre great. There are some neat ideas in play here with a hub-world, massive open levels, lots of puzzles, and letting enemies and NPCs react to you differently if you have your weapon out or not.
Shame the gameplay was trash, with enemies targeting you from across the map. William Shatner’s TekWar was never going to do well as even a huge boomer shooter fan like me never even knew it existed. It’s not like Tek War was a very huge property. One fun fact is that William Shatner’s TekWar beat out Duke Nukem 3D to market, a game that the build engine was designed for!
- . Westworld 2000
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The 90s were a magical time that I miss dearly. The gaming space was still so young that you would find releases of titles that were downright weird and almost experimental. Westworld 2000 is one weird FPS based on the film from 1973, and itself based on the book from none other than Michael Crichton. That man ruled the world for a couple of decades, and everyone wanted a piece of that Crichton pie. Shame that nearly every video game based on one of his works was a disaster no matter the genre.
Westworld 2000 released in 1996 but felt like a shooter developed before even Wolfenstein 3D. It’s a clunky shooter where the action on the screen seems to be delayed from your keypress. Seriously, users who played the game back in the day often complained that the controls didn’t work. The graphics are a mess and I can’t even tell what I’m looking at half the time. The in-games voices are laughable and the combat is clunky and lacks impact. The only thing worth mentioning is the games use of FMV that turns this game into an almost comedy of sorts.
- . Congo The Movie: The Lost City of Zinj
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Congo was not a good movie. Based on the book from Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, the studio behind it was betting big on the project considering the success of Jurassic Park. It’s bombed at the theaters and killed Ernie Hudson’s career as a leading actor; a damn shame. But since the marketing budget was so huge Congo got the Jurassic Park treatment before and after release. It got toys and, in our case, a video game adaptation that is very weird.
Congo The Movie: The Lost City of Zinj is an FPS released in 1996 for the Sega Saturn as a console exclusive. It’s actually a side-story about finding those weird blue diamonds for a telecom company. Look, Congo is a fucking weird book and movie. As a game it struggles on a console but was special in that it featured fully 3D weapons instead of the traditional sprite-based ones of other 90s shooters. The other thing the game is known for are the FMV cutscenes that are a real hoot!
- . CyClones
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Dropping a year after DOOM changed video games forever, CyClones looked to ape off that game’s success. Considering you’ve never heard of the game it’s safe to say that didn’t work, although it should have. CyClones was released by SSI but it’s a Raven Software game, one of the most legendary FPS developers who are technically still around today. Shame that they are forced to only make Call of Duty stuff now. CyClones features some really terrible FMV footage with even worse audio quality, almost as if they simply went with the onboard camera mics in a huge warehouse but the game, the game is something unique for 1994.
Raven actually did some really impressive things with CyClones as not only did it use an in-house game engine, but the gameplay used mouse aiming more akin to modern day shooters. You get a movable aiming reticle that allowed the player to look up and down, jump, and fire in any direction and position they wished. Where DOOM let you move right to left, CyClones let you aim anywhere. Items also had to be picked up by selecting them instead of just walking over them. Shame this one isn’t more well remembered as it pushed the emerging genre forward in a lot of ways.
- . Rock’n Shaolin: Legend of the Seven Paladins 3D
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So, you know how I mentioned earlier that TekWar was the first game to release using the Build Engine developed for Duke 3D? Well, I lied to you, sort of. While TekWar was released before Duke 3D, there was an unofficial build engine release with Rock’n Shaolin: Legend of the Seven Paladins 3D. Running off an illegally obtained copy of the build engine still in its beta form, Rock’n Shaolin: Legend of the Seven Paladins 3D is a hot mess and was only released in Tiawan and South Korea.
The game did see release in the West in a number of shareware packs that got sold at mom-and-pop computer shops and at those pop-up sales that were held at various fairgrounds that were all the rage for a while. The game is a nightmare to play and will almost certainly give you some form of eye damage from the ugly and repetitive textures. It’s like a poor man’s Shadow Warrior but without any of the charm and any of the fun. Stages all look the same with some Windows 95 brick wallpaper texture and enemies are simply palette swaps of a single model.
- . Gloom
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DOOM changed everything. Not only did it usher in a new age of video games and put the FPS genre on the map, but it also helped to kill of many a non-PC based, well PC. You see, back in the early 90s there wasn’t a PC market like there is today. Instead, there were a couple of competitors vying to take a chunk out of the IBM pie. Windows 95 and DOOM changed all of that, but PC platforms like the Amiga tried to hold out against those two powerhouses. Something very hard to do when Bill Gates was promoting DOOM in a trench coat and shotgun over footage of it running on Windows 95.
Gloom is a reaction to the DOOM craze, knowing that the Amiga would never see, or even be capable of running DOOM and the new wave of shooters coming to market. A neat feature of Gloom is that all enemies explode into gibs rather than lying dead on the floor like DOOM. This feature was heavily promoted at the time of its release. The game was a huge hit and ranks as the 18th best Amiga game ever released. The only real thing holding it back was the lack of weapon variety and that you could only carry a single weapon at a time.
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