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The thing that’s interesting is that for the most part, most maps aren’t actually terribly complex. The other is that Wolfenstein levels are almost all limited in the same ways. One is that Wolfenstein doesn’t let you avoid levels. Wolfenstein differs from this in two big ways. In Keen though, you can view other levels as ways to make you more capable of handling the levels you need – picking up more rayguns and lives (through points).
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Your main challenge beating Commander Keen as a series is going to be not so much completing all the levels as finding the levels you have to complete. Commander Keen games are mostly made up of unnecessary levels – Commander Keen 1 only needs something like seven levels out of something like twenty, Commander Keen 2 is almost nothing but the essential levels, and Commander Keen 3 features something like only three essential levels out of the whole game.
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That uncertainty is part of all the id Software work, of course. It’s that those games resist you through required actions, but the main way Wolfenstein resists you is through uncertainty. Games like Duke Nukem and Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure still have some stuff to get through, and I think I’ve hit on why. Yet, even then, there are other games of the same era which aren’t so swiftly run. Also, 100% consistant speeds thanks to processors and hard drives that are now thousands of times faster than the hardware Wolfenstein was made to run on definitely makes loading time faster.
That can definitely improve your speed in the game. The game interprets mouse input as an absolute indicator of speed – if you mouse up fast, the game interprets that movement as much faster than what it’ll let you get with your basic input. This isn’t worth a whole point unto itself, but it still struck me as an example of theme versus mechanic.Īnyway part of why Wolfenstein 3d speedruns are so fast is a piece of undiscovered functional technology. I actually noticed this while watching Blake Stone runs, because in Blake Stone the guns being all fed by the same energy cells makes some kind of sense, because it’s deliberately unreal. It’s funny to me how that stands out as silly. An episode is nine levels – some of these things are getting finished in 23 seconds! How is it possible that these games are designed around this sort of molasses-thick idea of ‘fast’ when ‘fast’ is so much faster?īy the way, thanks to opening that question, while I’m at it, I kind of want to point out how funny it is that the design of Wolfenstein 3D assumes that a handgun, a machine gun and a chaingun can all be fed with the same ammunition. Hell, the game itself comes with par times that gives levels times like 3:30, but right now that’s more than the record time for several episodes of the game. You can finish Wolfenstein 3D in 30 minutes, in a speedrun and that’s not even pushing it. With that taken into account, then, why are Wolfenstein Speedruns So Fast? The games don’t tend to be glitchy, because they don’t tend to try and do lots of things, instead choosing to feature lots of stuff. pcx file with a few spawn points on it, because backgrounds were so simple. Even the more complicated levels of Commander Keen could be stored as a. You can do a little many times, though, and when you have animations and textures worked out as making the bulk of your content, your levels can become basically tiny text files with markers on it for things to be spawned in. Games tended to be about a small amount of content, iterated on multiple times. You were mostly trying to push storage capacities – you had to fit your entire game on a 3.5 inch floppy, and with only 1-ish meg of space to work with, and not even a guarantee the game would get put on a hard drive, you wanted to make sure that your game’s content could fit. This period of time was a sweet spot for games, where you weren’t pushing the system super hard, and therefore there was less need to do ‘cute’ things with the processor. Sometimes, glitch performances make games faster, but most of these games were surprisingly glitch-light.
Thanks to CapnClever, a speedrunner who focuses on that particular era of DOS games, I’ve been enjoying the spectacle of watching games that were designed to soak up weeks of time and leave you thirsty for more being blitzed through in a matter of a few minutes. I’ve been watching a lot of speedruns for old shareware games. There, okay, we all done with the basics? Don’t need me explaining graph paper and stuff? Cool.
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The game started with you trapped in a dungeon full of nazis, with a limited toolset to escape that was, basically, killing nazis.
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One of the games made by id Software, as part of their arc of changing the face of PC gaming, Wolfenstein 3D was a spiritual successor to an old stealth game on the Apple II and other platforms, Castle Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein 3D is a classic first-person shooter game that was both pretty good and thanks to shareware, widely distributed.