Category Archives: Retro Reviews

The First Four

Maybe it’s the holidays, but I was recently hit by a random streak of nostalgia around my family’s first ever computer, the Commodore VIC-20. I’m guessing it was sometime around 1985 or 1986 that my dad, almost certainly inspired by another family that we became friends with, the father being a huge Commodore 64 nerd, brought us home a VIC-20. We quickly amassed some game cartridges, a tape deck and a couple of tapes filled with demos and games, a joystick, and soon enough a Zenith ZVM-123 monochrome monitor so my brother and I weren’t tying up the family TV. I thought it would be fun to go back and revisit those first four cartridge-based games. This is where it all started for me!

“Fast Eddie plays exactly how you might imagine from this screen.”

Fast Eddie is a single screen side-perspective platformer similar to more well-known titles like Lode Runner, Jumpman, and Donkey Kong. Your objective is to avoid these little mushroom looking “Sneaker” dudes while you climb ladders up and down multiple levels collecting “prizes” that appear at random. There’s a really tall Sneaker on the top level (called the “High-Top”) who will shrink in height with each prize you collect, eventually getting short enough for Eddie to jump over, which completes the stage. It’s pretty simple, but even on the VIC-20 it feels reasonably fast and responsive. The challenge is in timing your movements with the fast moving Sneakers, which is easy to do, but the faster you try to clear a level, the more likely you are to make a mistake and lose a life. I also checked out the Commodore 64 version while I was at it, which despite being more colorful with higher resolution, well, everything, doesn’t have quite the same charm as the VIC-20 version to me. Still, the more responsive and smoother feeling controls make it the superior version.

Despite the fact that I recall liking Fast Eddie as a kid, it wasn’t my favorite, nor did it get a ton of playtime in my house. I think that’s likely because, like so many early arcade style games, the formula is almost immediately obvious and doesn’t deviate much from what is established at the start in anything but difficulty. Once you “figure it out” the only real drive to keep playing is to push yourself to further levels and higher scores. That said, it is fairly addictive, and when I replayed it for the first time in preparation for writing this article, I ended up playing it for a lot longer than originally planned. Not bad!

“Despite the clown car colors, killing Klingons is serious business.”

I never got into this next game as a kid, likely confused by its multiple perspectives and chaotic action, but I have fond memories of my brother camping out in front of this game for hours, filling little notepads up with diagrams and drawings. Having put a fair amount of time into the game while revisiting it for this post, I’m guessing these were simply sketches of ships and maybe a log of how far he made it and his scores, because an RPG or adventure game this is not; there’s really nothing to map nor clues to jot down.

Despite its title, Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator is purely an arcade action game, but one that crams a fair amount of ingenuity into its simple concept. On the top left of the screen you have indicators showing your health, photon torpedoes, and warp power. On the top right, you see an overhead view of your ship and the space around it in a style very similar to Asteroids. On the bottom of the screen, you see a first person perspective from the viewscreen of your ship (I assume the USS Enterprise?) which is synchronized with the action in the top down view. Pretty nifty. You fly around these little “sectors” shooting Klingon battlecruisers who are either attacking you, or focused on attacking your starbases. You can fly to a starbase to get a small bump in health, torpedoes, and warp. Your normal attack is an unlimited, rapid fire blast that is supposed to represent your ship’s phasers, but you can also launch a torpedo which has a devastating area of effect, and warping is simply a speed boost which I actually never found all that much use for. Once you dispatch all of the enemies, hopefully saving your starbases in the process, your score is tallied up and you move to the next sector map. There are some simple boss stages every 4 or 5 sectors as well. All in all, it didn’t really hook me, but it was fun, and I can imagine some people really enjoying it.

I tried out the Commodore 64 port of the game as well, and as with most games that exist on both platforms, while the gameplay is more or less identical, the graphics and sound are greatly improved (you can actually tell what the ships are supposed to be!) and control is a little more responsive, although it’s not bad in the VIC-20 port. The experience was so much more enjoyable that I ended up playing for quite awhile, far surpassing my previous high score on the VIC-20 version. Interestingly, the original game both of these ports are based on is a 1982 Sega arcade game. The arcade game looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t think I ever played growing up. Boasting impressive hi-res vector graphics and some digitized sound samples, it looks damn cool, although the gameplay is basically the same as what is presented in the home computer versions.

“Frogger with a weird perspective and terrible controls? Sign me up!”

Out of the four of these games, there’s only one I had almost zero recollection of and that’s because, well, we barely played it, and we barely played it because it fucking sucked. Congo Bongo is a platformer that plays like a sloppy combination of Donkey Kong, Pitfall!, and Frogger, depending on which level you play. That is, the first level has much more of a Donkey Kong vibe, while the second brings in those Frogger elements. The key difference is that the levels are shown from something of a skewed isometric perspective. Different enough to keep the lawyers away, I guess. The wacky perspective, terrible, jumpy animations which make dodging coconuts and hopping onto moving platforms feel excruciatingly inaccurate, and the less than responsive joystick controls made a game that probably already relied a bit too much on memorization just one big bum out. I ended up beating the first stage (a feat I don’t recall if I ever managed as a kid) after about a billion tries but, running out of patience, abused TheC64’s save states to get through the second. That was it though, that’s the game! In theory, those two levels repeat with a higher difficulty 4 more times, but there’s no way I was going to go any further, at least not with this version.

This game was ported all over the place, however, and morbidly curious, I decided to check out the very similar Commodore 64 version of the game. I’m happy to report that while it looks quite close, it has more colors, better sprites, better animations, slightly better sound, and vastly superior controls. The monkeys even properly harass you in this version! Still only two levels though. Interestingly, the Commodore 64 actually had a second port released a couple of years later in 1985 which had much nicer graphics sporting a much better take on the arcade version’s isometric perspective, all 4 levels from arcade, and a lot of other original elements intact. Unfortunately the cracked dump I played glitched out on the last level so I couldn’t legitimately beat it, but hey, not too shabby! In either case, I’d have been a lot more satisfied with the Commodore 64 versions of the game than I was with this awful VIC-20 one. Honestly, the best part was the awesome box with its colorful cartoony characters and massive Sega logo.

Oh, and yes, believe it or not this game was based on an arcade game. The arcade Congo Bongo actually had beautiful graphics for the time and, while I’m sure it was still a quarter sucking kick in the balls, the gameplay looks a lot smoother. As a kid I had no idea it was ever in the arcade, and I didn’t know until researching the game for this replay that there’s actually an interesting story behind the game being something of a troll of Nintendo over a lawsuit related to Donkey Kong. I’ve never seen that event referenced before, but I wonder if that’s where the Sega and Nintendo beef all started?

“Actually, Spider City doesn’t look half bad.”

My favorite of these games as a kid was Spider City, AKA Flash Gordon. Spider City was a side-scrolling shooter, likely influenced by the arcade classic Defender. On the top half of the screen is a view of your ship, and on the bottom a sort of mini-map showing you the tunnel system you’re navigating. The map was crucial for locating your objective, the hordes of hatching spider warriors you needed to murder. Of course, you also need to avoid debris, patrol ships, and other hazards, as well as rescue captured spacemen. I remember thinking the game looked good as a kid, but… eh? Still, of these four games it does the most with the VIC’s meager sound capabilities by a longshot.

In retrospect, dazzling graphics aside, I don’t know why it appealed to me quite so much back then, other than I remember wanting to ape my brother’s deep fascination with Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator by diving deep into and mastering a game of my own. That said, like Star Trek: SOS, there wasn’t actually all that much to master. Fly through the map avoiding and/or shooting everything on the screen (except for spacemen, which you could fly over to rescue) and seek out the hatching pods, mow down the hatching spiders which would hopefully grant your ship a temporary shield, then rinse and repeat until the entire map is clear. There were also these “disruptor” zones which moved around the map and would fill your screen with debris when you entered one, though you could shoot the generator inside of them to freeze them temporarily if you couldn’t simply avoid them. Of course, all of these details are fairly obtuse and unintuitive, and I’m mostly only able to talk about them clearly because I read the manual.

Unlike the rest of these games, Spider City didn’t have a Commodore 64 port. In fact, the only other place it appeared was the Atari 8-bit computers. Odd, given that it’s actually fairly fun.

These days I think I probably prefer Fast Eddie to Spider City, but I still have to give Spider City major credit for being the first video game I ever loved. Additional takeaways? While I’m endlessly grateful to my dad for bringing home my first ever personal computer, I mean, I have multiple hobbies and a career to thank for my interest in computers, I definitely wish it was a Commodore 64 instead of a VIC-20. Oh well. As an aside, I’d love to make a part two to this if I can ever figure out exactly what those cassette tapes I mentioned having were. I have no idea if they were commercial releases or otherwise widely distributed, or if some dude at whatever local computer shop my dad got this stuff from cobbled them together himself. A mystery for another day. *shrug*

Apologies for the poor quality pictures – there are some major color inaccuracies, for instance. These were photos from my TV (usually at night, even) rather than actual screenshots. Box art stolen from LaunchBox’s games database.

Wolfenstein 3D / Spear of Destiny Review

Note: The screenshots posted on this page have been scaled up a little from their tiny native resolutions as well as had their aspect ratios corrected to proper 4:3 dimensions as they should have looked on CRT monitors originally. For posterity’s sake you can also click them to view the “pixel perfect” originals.

Introduction

“Wolfenstein 3D”

“…and Spear of Destiny!”

I’d been whining to my poor parents about wanting a new PC for literally years. While it seemed like I might have finally worn them down, I’d do whatever I could to play with any and every kind of computer whenever the opportunity presented itself in the meantime. One of those few opportunities was my 8th grade computer class. The first ever class I had with semi-modern IBM compatible PCs. The class was okay, but the main event was what happened when the last bell of the day rang and our computer teacher’s newly formed ham radio club gathered. For one reason or another, the club almost instantly devolved into most of us just hanging out in the computer lab and screwing around most every afternoon, and we were absolutely fine with that.

Our computer lab was in a pretty sorry state. Other than our teacher’s PCs, which were more or less dedicated to ham and, soon, running our middle school’s official bulletin board system, most of the computers we had were some form of outdated IBM AT clone with zero notable upgrades to speak of. Us nerdy delinquents quickly discovered that one was a cut above the rest, though: a 386 with a VGA adapter and an soundcard. Soon enough, this uber PC got pulled out into the middle of the classroom so we could all gather around it, watching and taking turns playing whatever the latest random game someone smuggled in and managed to get working was.

“A showdown with a Nazi guard.”

One fateful day it was the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D. This machine only had an AdLib in it, so no sound effects, but it didn’t matter. To see Wolfenstein 3D smoothly rendering its glorious violence in full 256 color VGA was utterly amazing. On that day, the obsession I had to acquire a new PC turned into absolute fucking resolve. Wolfenstein 3D was already a year old at that point, and I’d get to see the shareware episode of Doom running (rather poorly) on the same machine before the school year was over, but you can bet when my parents finally caved and spent a ridiculous amount of money on a new 486SX/33 for me that summer, one of the first things I did was drag my mom to Radioshack to buy me a copy of the Wolfenstein 3D shareware disk.

Loading it up for the first time, my AZTECH Sound Blaster clone pumping out that distinctive AdLib soundtrack as my cell door loudly rolled open and I cautiously crept around the corner, pistol in hand, a Nazi guard spotting me and shouting “Achtung!” as he sprang to action, is something I’ll probably always vividly remember, and something that still feels fresh whenever I revisit the game. I loved Wolfenstein 3D! Doom soon utterly overshadowed it, sure, but Wolfenstein 3D will always be the game that introduced me to the now ubiquitous First Person Shooter genre and its masters, Id Software.

“I still have my original shareware version. 3 bucks well spent (even though there’s absolutely no mention on the package that this is only the shareware version… shady!)”

Id Software was formed largely on the back of John Carmack’s technically impressive smooth side-scrolling routines and he soon turned his attention to developing an equally impressive first person ray casting, 2.5D engine which first saw publication in 1991’s Hovertank 3D and a little later, Catacomb 3-D, both released by Softdisk. By the time Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992, Id had greatly improved the engine, making the controls more accessible, upgrading from EGA to VGA graphics, and adding AdLib music and Soundblaster sound effects. Probably most importantly, they abandoned Softdisk’s subscription publishing model and moved to publishing under Apogee’s shareware model which was already earning them some success with the Commander Keen series. Releasing as shareware meant much, much more exposure, and the game went on to be wildly successful. A commercial only sequel (really, more of a standalone expansion pack) called Spear of Destiny, which I’ll also be covering here, was released by FormGen the following year in 1993, leading to even more exposure. Wolfenstein 3D was a bonafide hit.

Gameplay

Wolfenstein 3D established what quickly became the basic gameplay template for most of the FPS games released in the 1990s. Each level begins in a predetermined location of a self-contained area (usually called a “map” in FPS vernacular) and it’s your job guide your character to the exit. Some parts of the map are behind locked doors which require keys you can pick up along the way, adding a tiny bit of complexity to the exercise. Of course, there are also guards patrolling the map who will shoot you on sight and alert others to your presence if you don’t take them out first. There’s also weapons, ammo, and health scattered around to collect, and unusually for the genre, various treasures that can be gathered to increase your score. It’s a simple formula, and with Wolfenstein 3D’s beautifully performing engine, you can often absolutely blaze through these maps.

“The end of level score tally.”

At odds with the blazing speed of the gameplay, the score tallied at the end of each mission rewards 100% completion, which includes enemies killed, treasure collected, and “secrets” discovered. These secret hidden areas became a fairly normal part of early FPS design, but Wolfenstein’s are particularly infamous for not being marked or otherwise hinted at in any way. This lead to the stereotype of players running up and down every single wall in every single room and corridor frantically tapping the open key, colloquially known as “wall humping” thanks to how absurd this looks and sounds. That said, without exploring quite a bit, you’re unlikely to get a 100% completion in any of these categories the first time through.

Exploration tends to be unavoidable anyway thanks to Wolfenstein’s labyrinthian maps. While the game starts out with simple designs seemingly based on vaguely realistic floor plans, it quickly goes off the deep end with some gigantic and thoroughly maze-like map designs, and with no auto-map to speak of, getting to the end of these take quite a while and be more than a little frustrating. Navigating the map in the correct order to find the aforementioned keys is the closest Wolfenstein ever comes to throwing puzzles at the player – there are no special trigger areas, switches, elevators, etc. as would soon become staples of the FPS genre. Lack of gameplay variety is not the only problem with Wolfenstein’s maps, as the maps themselves tend to be quite repetitive, with the engine only supporting simple, 90 degree angled walls on a single, level plane.

“Ow. The mutants in episode 2 are fucking obnoxious.”

A bit more challenge comes from the enemies, which are often positioned to strike the second you open a door or go around a corner. While not quite “monster closet” levels of cheesiness, Wolfenstein can occasionally feel a little unfair when it comes to purposely devious placement of enemies, and getting caught by surprise can quickly lead to your death, especially on higher difficulty levels. There’s not too much variety in enemies either, with probably the most crucial variable besides their hit points and rate of fire being how quickly they draw on you in the aforementioned ambush situations.

The variety of your own arsenal is similarly a little slim, with the only thing being anywhere close to exotic being the minigun, which I tend to avoid using during anything but the end of the episode boss fights – the machine gun’s rate of fire is quick enough to effectively stun/stagger enemies but doesn’t chew through the ammo nearly as quickly as the minigun. This is notable, as ammunition can be a little sparse early on which can lend the game a bit of a survival feel, adding some much needed tension to the formula. This mostly falls to the wayside as you progress, assuming you live long enough to hang on to your ammunition supply between maps. These simple, hit scan based weapons do feel pretty satisfying though, which I have to think is a big part of what makes Wolfenstein so damn enjoyable.

As I said in my Duke Nukem 3D review, the old school style of FPS level design ends up feeling quite tedious to me, and in Wolfenstein the simplicity and lack of variety only exacerbates that feeling. As a kid, while playing through the first, shareware episode felt a little bit repetitive, it didn’t really overstay its welcome. By the time you add in the full version’s 5 additional episodes, and if you also play Spear of Destiny, which adds in another 21 levels, that’s a total of 81 levels, never mind the two GenForm bonus mission packs for Spear of Destiny, for another 42 maps, yeah, it’s a bit of a slog.

“Probably the most popular map editor at the time, the aptly named MAPEDIT.”

Surprisingly, a lot of people didn’t seem to think so though, as in addition to Wolfenstein 3D kicking off the FPS genre, it also introduced the world to FPS map making and modding. Wolfenstein’s data structures were quickly reverse engineered and map creation software was released. Given how simple Wolfenstein’s maps are, these editors were simple to use and a lot of people found themselves creating their own maps and campaigns, and a few even dove into editing the sprites and textures, creating some early examples of something close to resembling “total conversion” mods. Personally, I never played around with 3rd party Wolfenstein 3D maps and modifications back in the day, but apparently they were quite popular.

As a quick aside, some of the later console ports of Wolfenstein 3D do make tweaks to the gameplay, from the minor such as differently designed maps, to the more notable ones such as new weapons and even an automap feature. While it’s mostly the DOS version I’m covering here, I still feel this is noteworthy, as some of you might be reading this thinking “What about the flamethrower?” or “What? I used the automap when I played it!”

Story

Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t have much of a story, rather it sets up scenarios and throws you into the action, never really advancing anything resembling a plot. Nevertheless, in presenting you with excuses to be in these mazes, it does at least make an attempt at throwing some fluff in in the form of text introductions and endings to each episode.

“The introduction to episode 1 (as taken from the in-game readme in the shareware version!)”

“Continued.”

“I’ll definitely tell me grandkids about this.”

Directly inspired by the 1981’s Apple II action stealth game, Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 3D follows the exploits of allied spy Captain William J. “B.J.” Blazkowicz against Nazi forces in WWII. The most famous of these scenarios, the first episode, has BJ attempting escape from the dungeon fortress Wolfenstein where he was being held prisoner. After that, BJ heads into Castle Hollehammer to stop Operation Eisenfaust – a sinister plot that involves reanimating corpses in an attempt to create the ultimate super soldier. In the third and final episode of the original trilogy, BJ heads to Hitler’s massive bunker complex underneath the Reichstag to put an end to the Third Reich once and for all. This is the definitive set of missions, without a doubt.

The second trio of episodes, snarkily called the “Nocturnal Missions”, are actually prequels, taking place before BJ was captured, in which he attempts to put a stop to a chemical weapons program. These missions aren’t bad, but don’t really add anything essential to the story.

“Spear of Destiny… now with more wall textures!”

Spear of Destiny, on the other hand, is notable because it fully commits to fantasy Nazi tropes, having BJ attempting to stop Hitler from using the occult powers of the legendary holy relic, the Lance of Longinus. He infiltrates Castle Nuremberg and eventually retrieves it, but not before getting transported to hell and having to defeat a demon “Angel of Death” in order to escape. Yes, you go to hell to fight a demon! Wolfenstein REALLY dove into the deep end of the occult stuff here, foreshadowing the full on demonic assault of Doom a year later. Outside of that, again, these missions hardly feel necessary.

Mission specifics aside, the fantasy World War II setting felt fresh to me at the time, especially when combined with Wolfenstein 3D’s immersive first person presentation. Even today, despite how exhaustively the setting and its associated tropes have been mined, the particular combination of pulp comic book action, occultism, zombies, super technology, and real life World War II presented in the original Wolfenstein 3D games feels like a relatively unique blend. I’d guess most people would prefer either semi-realistic World War II settings or even deeper dives into these concepts (as presented in later games in the series) but Wolfenstein 3D’s take certainly was enjoyable.

Oddly, the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D features a totally reworked plot in an awkward attempt to censor any association with Nazi Germany. All this really accomplishes is turning the antagonists (renamed the “Master State”) into a sloppy and rather obvious analog for Nazi Germany, with Hitler being named Staatmeister and given a shave. Humph!

Controls

Wolfenstein 3D’s controls probably feel totally alien to gamers that grew up after FPS games moved to the WASD + “mouselook” style of control, but what Wolfenstein 3D did at the time set the template for other first person shooters for quite a while: Both hands on the keyboard with your right hand moving you back, forward, left, and right using your arrow keys and your left hand doing everything else with the far left side of the keyboard – Left Ctrl, Left Alt, Space Bar, and Left Shift were typically used to fire, strafe, open doors, and run, respectively. I got used to this control style with Wolfenstein 3D and perfected it with Doom, and had to pretty much force myself into using the newer convention only after it became the norm across the genre.

“Yeah, you shoot dogs in this game. Seriously vicious dogs.”

Granted, part of what makes it work is how simple Wolfenstein 3D is. There’s very little going on outside of moving, firing, and opening doors. You don’t need to (and indeed, can’t) look up and down, nor do you need precision aim since there is a vague aim-assist (or maybe just big hit boxes?) While I’m not sure how it technically works, it’s definitely less pronounced than in latter early FPS games since there is no variation in verticality in Wolfenstein 3D to make it jarringly obvious that your shots are being angled outside of your control.

Still, attempts to get those simple controls mapped to my old Gravis GamePad back in the day never ended very satisfactorily. In the case of the numerous console ports, greater care was put into getting the feel of playing on a gamepad right and thankfully, most of them have various degrees of passable implementations. Again, the simplistic controls make that translation fairly easy. Newer console ports, such as the Xbox Live Arcade version, introduce the modern dual-stick FPS control style to the game, albeit with the right stick only used to look left and right. It sounds weird on paper, but it feels pretty normal and overall I found Wolfenstein 3D to be right at home on an Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller.

“It’s pretty typical to leave a trail of gore in your wake.”

While there is mouse support in the original DOS versions, it’s very rudimentary and won’t satisfy anyone trying to replicate modern control schemes. If you’re looking for that experience, the most popular of the Windows ports of the game, ECWolf, includes support for proper WASD + mouselook, and it works excellently. Like the Xbox 360 port, mouselook is limited to looking left and right, but it still feels fine. In fact, it’s my preferred way to play these days.

Graphics

While Wolfenstein 3D’s graphics aren’t typically the first thing I think about when I look back on the game, I have no doubt that they had quite a lot to do with the game’s success. As mentioned, the Wolf3D engine ran extremely smoothly, even with its VGA textured walls (an upgrade over the original Hovertank 3D) and sometimes large amounts of sprites on screen. Floors and ceilings remained untextured, oddly, but in playing the game this doesn’t really stand out as a deficiency. If anything, it helps the environment feel a little less cluttered than less skilled implementations of fully textured “2.5D” environments in some future games.

“The death animations certainly give a hint of what was to come in Doom.”

The real standout here is the artwork. An obvious precursor to his work in Doom, Adrian Carmack’s colorful, stylized sprite and animation work is a mix between the cartoony and (particularly in the death animations) dark and macabre, and is simply jam-packed full of character. As with in Doom, he really manages to nail the kind of “cool” that appeals greatly to teenage boys, without fully tipping over the edge into being embarrassingly cringy for adults to enjoy. Interestingly, I read somewhere that one of the reasons for Wolfenstein’s distinct, colorful look is that many of the textures and sprites were originally drawn with the limited EGA 16 color palette and then touched up with the engine’s move to VGA, which makes a lot of sense.

I will have to throw in just a little negativity here. While I mentioned the variety in weapons and enemies, as well as the simplicity of the maps already, the lack of variety in wall textures and environmental objects adds to this feeling of repetition to a large degree as well. While there are a fair number of different wall texture sets, it won’t take long until you’ve seen them all. This is huge factor in what makes the maps a little too maze-like, as well – when every room looks the same, exactly how are you supposed to tell them apart? While Spear of Destiny adds a few new textures into the mix, it really feels like a token effort.

“Neat little details abound, like BJ grinning ear to ear when he picks up a minigun.”

Still, altogether, the look of Wolfenstein 3D is quite strong and holds up surprisingly well today, with this lack of environmental variety hurting the gameplay more than the presentation.

Interestingly, the graphics found in the original DOS release were not the only ones around. When the game was ported to the SNES some of the sprites were redesigned, most notably the weapons and your character’s head indicator on the status bar. When ported to the Macintosh, the rest of the graphics were redesigned, redrawn, and/or tweaked, including the enemy sprites and wall textures being drawn at double the resolution for cleaner scaling. The Jaguar and 3DO releases were also based on this version, though again with various tweaks of their own. Opinions on these facelifts vary but it seems like the new graphics in these versions are generally well liked and don’t stray too far from the spirit of the original work.

Sound

From the second the title screen loads and the AdLib rendition of Horst-Wessel-Lied starts blasting, you know you’re in for something different. Like with its graphics, it’s hard to imagine what Wolfenstein 3D would have been without its excellent soundwork.

“Hitler delivering a serious beatdown.”

First, you have Bobby Prince’s soundtrack which is one of my personal favorite examples of classic AdLib music to this day. He manages to combine the sizzling snare rolls of military marches, triumphant anthemic horn blasts, and the intrigue of a good spy thriller into tracks that somehow gel with the feeling of sneaking around these Nazi dungeons almost perfectly. While some of these tunes can get a little repetitive, as an overall package it is very strong.

On top of that you have the Sound Blaster digital sound effects. The first cell door you exit slamming shut behind you, a sound you’ll hear a thousand more times before beating the game, in fact, grabs your attention and puts you at high alert. The gunfire thuds nicely, and the barks of the enemies as they spot you and, with any luck, go down, are awesome regardless of their humorously loose interpretation of German phrases.

“Officers draw on you in and instant, barely giving you time to react to their bark.”

More than just sounding cool, this is one of the first games I recall playing where the sound effects greatly affect gameplay. It’s easy to unwittingly attract enemies to your location while clearing out the map, and sometimes hearing a door open in the distance is your only hint that you’re being hunted. Likewise, almost every enemy “barks” at you the second it sees you, often giving you a few seconds to react before taking fire. Besides helping you avoid getting shot, this can also help identify which type of enemy it is, which can make the difference between life and death. That is, getting caught with your back to a normal guard isn’t nearly as detrimental as letting one of the machine gun wielding SS elite soldiers get a free burst off on you.

Returning to the subject of ports, it won’t surprise you by now to read that the music and sound effects in many of these versions have been touched up or replaced entirely. Most notably, the Mac and 3DO versions have their own, mostly totally distinct, orchestrated soundtracks from Brian Luzietti. While these have an entirely different feel from Bobby Prince’s original soundtrack, it’s hard to deny how great they are too.

Old Age and Alternative Versions

As usual, my primary method of playing through the game for this review was my dedicated 486 gaming PC. I didn’t bother disabling my cache or trying to slow my system down in any other ways, as I recalled it running fine back in the day on a machine only a tiny bit slower than this one. Other than running into some issues with the non-standard way I had my Sound Blaster configured at the time, I had no trouble running it, and it ran just as buttery smooth as expected. There is an issue with secret “pushwalls” sometimes moving further than they should on systems with extremely fast CPUs, but this requires some very specific conditions, thus isn’t a widespread issue.

As for playing it on a modern system, I also played through a significant amount of it in DOSBox. I used the pre-configured version from GOG, although I did have to increase my CPU “cycles” setting to make it run as smoothly as I’m accustomed to. Once I did that, I found that it played quite well. Given that if you acquire Wolfenstein 3D legally from places like Steam or the aforementioned GOG these days, you’re almost certainly going to be getting a copy bundled with DOSBox, don’t forget that you may need to tweak this and maybe a few other things to get the game running optimally.

“ECWolf running smooth as butter in 1080p.”

“ECWolf with the ECMac mod!”

“ECWolf’s automap, as basic as it is, is a godsend.”

That said, I also played through a large amount of the game in the most popular Windows ports of the game, ECWolf. I had only intended on playing through a single episode in ECWolf, but enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up playing through the entirety of Spear of Destiny in it as well. Besides running just as smooth as the original engine, ECWolf natively supports widescreen resolutions, modern WASD + mouselook controls, and includes an automap. It’s hard for me to quantify just how much more enjoyable the game is with an automap at my disposal – it’s a huge quality of life improvement and goes a long way to nullifying my complaints about the the repetitive, maze-life maps. ECWolf also includes some pretty cool drop-in modding capabilities, and I spent some time playing with a mod called “ECMac” which overhauls the original game’s maps with the improved aesthetics of the Macintosh version. Extremely cool.

Finally, I also played through an entire episode in the Xbox 360 / Xbox Live Arcade port of the game (on my Xbox One.) Despite some well-known issues with the music and some very minor texture changes, I found this version to be faithful to the DOS original and a fair representation for new players wanting to check out the game without dealing with getting it to work on a PC. As noted above, playing it with dual sticks on a modern joypad is a little odd at first, but I got used to it extremely quickly.

“The SNES version looks passable up close.”

“But the scaling is extremely harsh. You can barely make out the guard here!”

“The 3DO version, on the other hand, is mostly excellent.”

There are, of course, other ports. I mentioned some of the original console and PC ports: SNES, Macintosh, Jaguar, 3DO, and oddly, the Apple IIGS. There were also later ports to GBA and IOS, and unofficial ports for a number of systems, almost reaching Doom’s ridiculous levels of ubiquity. Some of these ports include their own maps and other odd changes that could be worth looking into for the truly dedicated. There are also some hidden versions and throwbacks in newer games, such as the original Xbox port included with Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War, and the cool little appearances in Doom II, Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus… too cool!

The original game manuals are available when purchasing the game and various other sources, though besides being a straightforward introduction to the game, they’re not really required. You can also find the official hint books that came with boxed copies of the games around too. These hint books aren’t too useful outside of having detailed diagrams of every map in the original game, but they’re fun to flick through and even include some bonus vintage pictures of the Id Software guys.

Sequels and Related Games

Id Software moved on to Doom almost as soon as Wolfenstein 3D was out the door, and most wouldn’t consider Spear of Destiny a proper follow-up. It wasn’t until almost 10 years later that Gray Matter Interactive put out Return to Castle Wolfenstein, rebooting the series with some success. It was almost as long for it to get a sequel, the Raven Software developed Wolfenstein in 2009. In 2014, we finally got the acclaimed Wolfenstein: The New Order which continues the series, and it’s prequel, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which is somewhat of a re-imaging of the events of the earlier titles. The New Order got a proper sequel in 2017 with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Along the way there was also Wolfenstein RPG for mobile devices, though I never got to play that one before it dropped off the face of the earth.

“While the guard is slow to react, the SS soldier is about to drill me.”

There were also plenty of other games that used the Wolf3D engine and its derivatives. Besides its predecessors, Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D, the sci-fi Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold and its sequel Blake Stone: Planet Strike are favorites of mine and I’ll likely cover them here some day. There’s also the much less enjoyable Operation Body Count and Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, and the infamously bizarre Super 3D Noah’s Ark for SNES. Using a heavily modified version of the engine, Apogee’s Rise of the Triad: Dark War actually started life as a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, and some hints of that exist in the game as-released. Finally, straying off a little more, technically, the Raven Software developed Shadowcaster used what was a bit of a stepping stone between Wolf3D and the Doom engine, AKA Id Tech 1, kicking off a long history of association between the two companies.

Closing

“The camera zooms out to show you in 3rd person as you exit an epsiode. Awesome touch!”

It’s honestly been a treat for me to head back into the corridors of Castle Wolfenstein and to see just how closely my memories of blasting Nazis and hording treasure hold up. I think others who remember Wolfenstein 3D and other, similar early FPS games fondly will potentially enjoy playing the game too, at least until its repetitiveness wears out its welcome. That said, if you were brought up on newer FPS games with frilly extras like “stories” and “mechanics” its hard to imagine Wolfenstein 3D keeping your interest even that long. It’s a highly influential, well polished, fun, but at the end of the day, very limited game, and it was improved on in just about every conceivable way by Id Software’s follow-up, Doom, and the long line of first person shooters that followed it. Outside of the nostalgic and those interested in FPS history, it’s unlikely to entertain all that much, sadly.

Bummer of an aside: While writing this and reminiscing about my old middle school computer science class, I thought it might be fun to track down my teacher and thank him for being an influence in my own successful career in information technology, only to discover that he passed away in 2012. Pouring one out for you, Mr. Miller!

Neuromancer Review

Introduction

“Neuromancer!”

One of the best part of being into retro gaming and, indeed, doing these reviews, is exploring all manner of interesting and bizarre games that I’ve never played and in many cases had never even heard of before. 1988’s Neuromancer is a standout example of this. Containing so many individual elements that I’m particularly drawn to, from its dark cyberpunk setting to its late 80s adventure game trappings, never mind that William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy are some of my favorite books, on paper, this is my dream game. Yet, it’s a game that I nor practically anyone I know had played, despite being based on a hugely influential novel, being somewhat innovative for its time, and even being considered a bona fide classic in certain circles.

The story goes that at some point in the mid 80s, counterculture LSD fanatic Timothy Leary read William Gibson’s Neuromancer and it changed his life. Not too much earlier, he had also discovered the captivating world of interactive fiction games, which had also changed his life. At some point the potential intersection became obvious, and Leary obtained the rights to make a game based on Neuromancer, eventually partnering up with Brian Fargo at Interplay, who ultimately designed, developed, and published the game. Unfortunately Interplay had just released cult-classic Wasteland under Electronic Arts, and were soon to release an absolute must-have at the time, Battle Chess, sandwiching Neuromancer into relative obscurity.

“A robot? What game is this again?”

Adding to that obscurity, Neuromancer’s release fell in what was an extremely awkward period for PC gaming; a transitional time between the end of the 8-bit personal computer era and the widespread popularity of the newer 16-bit computers like the Amiga and the Atari ST, and of course, the rise of the IBM PC as a popular gaming platform. IBM PCs took a little bit of time to catch up, however; low color but higher resolution EGA was still in vogue, and add-on sound and music cards such as the Adlib and Roland’s MT32 hadn’t begun to see widespread use yet. On the other hand, Neuromancer was somewhat of a tour de force on squeezing content into and power out of its lead platform, the aging Commodore 64.

For this review I’m playing through the inferior IBM PC version, but honestly, this lackluster port probably only adds to the quirkiness of this already unique game.

Gameplay

Another side effect of this awkward, transitional period of gaming, is the gameplay itself. By the late 80s a lot of PC games were extremely creative affairs, including all kinds of new and experimental gameplay concepts, often forced together in unusual ways, and many of the genre tropes we take for granted today hadn’t quite been established. Unfortunately that meant that when those genres did get more established, some of these transitional, experimental games became evolutionary dead-ends, as it were. In my King’s Quest review I talked about the design and even UI differences between King’s Quest’s AGI and SCI versions. Neuromancer takes a lot of adventure game ideas from old AGI games and their contemporaries, but also tosses in a huge helping of roleplay, and then throws in this massive twist of online interfaces including exploring cyberspace itself. You could easily argue that Neuromancer has more akin to classic graphical RPGs than run-of-the-mill adventure games like King’s Quest. That doesn’t make it a bad game by most standards, but it does make it a weird one.

“The end of the book would have been a lot shorter if Neuromancer was just chilling in the lobby.”

Neuromancer is split into several different, distinct gameplay systems, but for the sake of simplification, let’s reduce this down to two halves, which roughly represent the two halves of the game (though it is a semi-nonlinear game, so it’s definitely possible that you won’t have anything even close to a 50/50 split.) First, there’s the offline adventure section.

Neuromancer starts with your character standing on a screen representing a bar, where you’ve apparently just woken up after a rough evening of drinking and eating pasta. A text box describes the scene for you, and the bartender barks at you. From here, the game looks like a traditional adventure game, albeit an archaic, odd twist on some of the more conventional tropes of the genre. You can walk around these screens, navigating the city, and talking to various characters along your way, but that’s about the extent of it. Talking to people can get you some useful information, but it mostly serves as a way to upgrade your skills and equipment. In other words, almost every character is a traditional RPG shopkeeper NPC.

Your other options in the overworld are more interesting – you can access PAX terminals, which let you access basic banking functions, and read message boards, which work a bit like old school BBSes. The messages mostly contain background fluff but sometimes contain useful information too. You can even send messages, which is used once or twice as a solution to a puzzle, as it were.

“You’ll be entering a ton of linkcodes and passwords early in the game.”

Finally, there are access ports, which is where things really start to get interesting. By using your cyberdeck in an area with a port, you can use a software application called “Comlink” to connect to various databases, or “bases.” Comlink is something akin to a terminal program, and bases are similar to old dial up BBSes: Small, closed off systems that consist of memos, files you can download, more message boards, and sometimes other special functions. As a BBS junkie from way back, it’s pretty fascinating to see a view of what the Internet might be like in the future looking through the contemporary lens of dial-up BBSes and mainframe systems. It’s also interesting to note just how much the users of these apparently futuristic online systems resemble those of the underground BBS scene of the 80s and 90s. This was an unexpected shot of nostalgia for me!

Anyway, to connect to a base you need to know its linkcode, which is something like an AOL keyword, if anyone remembers those. Once connected, you’ll then need a password to get access. Bases have multiple levels, each with its own password. Once you’re on, the main function of these “bases” is essentially to provide more linkcodes and passwords to other bases, or hints to find and figure new ones out, as well as downloads for improved software, to progress, with higher levels usually having some additional, previously inaccessible messages, downloads, or other functions.

“In retrospect I’m not sure why I thought online banking would make a good screenshot.”

Hints are important in Neuromancer, because, despite being fairly non-linear in terms of structure, progression is generally guided by a series of gates: Do you know a linkcode to connect to a base? Do you know the access code to get into the base? Do you have a high enough version of Comlink to work with a base? Do you have some other required software or know the appropriate level of skill to “solve” a puzzle? These questions are answered one by one in a fairly orderly way. The biggest challenge, generally speaking, is trying to keep track of the vast amount of information you’re given. You may have half a dozen or more of these micro puzzles progressing at any one time. This is a game that requires taking notes if I’ve ever played one. By the time I was halfway through I had a notebook that looked like the scribblings of a madman, filled with linkcodes, encrypted and unencrypted passwords, names, places, account numbers, etc.

Surprisingly, this stage in the game isn’t quite as tedious as it sounds. You don’t have to do too much walking around, the fluff is interesting and even a little funny when it works, and the act of juggling all of this information, manipulating people and systems, connecting to a base, snooping around in it, taking what you’ve learned to connect to the next one, etc. actually starts to feel a lot like something resembling legitimate, largely social engineering powered, hacking. In fact, at this point Neuromancer feels more like some odd twist on a hacking simulator than any sort of adventure game.

“Welcome to cyberspace!”

That, and the puzzles aren’t as frustrating as vintage PC gaming veterans are probably imaging from a 80s game where information gathering and solving puzzles is the order of the day. The fact is, for the most part, the different puzzles and their solutions are strung together fairly well, and there are never too many of these little mysteries sitting there, unsolved, at any one time. That might not sound like a big deal, but it’s far easier to figure out your next move based on a few distinct clues than it is to figure it out when you have 10s of them pointing you in every possible direction.

Eventually with all of the skills you’ve learned and software you’ve gathered, you’ll manage to make some extra cash from all of your hacking exploits, and can upgrade your deck to something “cyberspace capable”. Once you have one of these decks, not only can you use Comlink to connect to bases, but you can enter the Matrix, and thus begins the second half of the game.

Cyberspace is essentially a graphical representation of the back-end infrastructure of the aforementioned individual bases. As you move through the Matrix you can connect to the same databases in virtual space, but this time you can access them through their back doors. People aren’t complete morons in this imaginary future, however: all of these back doors are protected by ICE, or Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, which means you need to perform some hacking to get in. Hacking ICE requires using a rotation of programs on your deck to damage or otherwise weaken the ICE, as well as occasionally repair your own systems. You select one of your available programs and wait for it to affect the ICE. Meanwhile, the ICE is firing back with its own damaging hacks. It’s honestly not incredibly thrilling, but you still need to be on your toes. Once the ICE is defeated, you have maximum access to the base. Sometimes this means newer information and software than you previously discovered access to, sometimes not, but generally speaking completing these hacks helps you progress your character’s ability to move deeper into cyberspace.

“Attempting to defeat an AI.”

Sometimes when you defeat a base’s ICE you wind up not in the database, but staring down an AI. Unlike the Sprawl Trilogy this game was based on, their seems to be quite a few AIs running around the Matrix. Each AI has its own personality and take on and involvement in the overarching plot of the game. To defeat an AI you use your various skills in much the same way as you used your deck’s software; rotating through different skills to cause damage and healing yourself when required while the AI takes turns pummeling you back. A lot of these fights can be pretty close, but if you’ve been keeping your skills and warez up, you should beat any AI the game intends for you to be able to beat.

As to that intention, the different areas or “zones” of cyberspace, and to a lesser degree individual instances of ICE and AI, are gated by your level skills and software, which is essentially the gameplay loop of this last section of the game: access an area of cyberspace, hack all of the bases and defeat all of the AIs to upgrade your software and upgrade your skills, respectively, and then move on to the next area. Again, very RPG-like. There are some minor diversions along the way, but at this point the game turns into a bit of a slog until you eventually go head to head with the titular AI, Neuromancer, in one last, climatic battle.

Story

Sadly, despite being based on a celebrated novel, Neuromancer’s story is not one of its strong points.

For one, there’s barely any narrative to speak of. Instead, the game is a bit of a hamfisted execerise in “environmental storytelling”; it seems that you’re supposed to take a lot of context out of the presentation of the world itself, with what isn’t inferred from the setting found in text stashed on PAX and database message boards, crushed between various pieces of fun but perhaps ultimately distracting fluff. In fact, there’s so much of this other stuff that it can be hard to identify what is and isn’t actually supposed to be relevant to the plot. Honestly, I can easily imagine someone who hadn’t read the book being completely lost by this method of delivery.

“Maelcum’s cringeworthy faux-Jamaica is lovingly recreated. Yay.”

Hopefully you’ll eventually piece together that many of your fellow “console cowboys” have gone missing or have been “flatlined” in what sniffs of conspiracy. You then discover that a group of rogue AIs are responsible and defeat them one by one, leading to a confrontation with Neuromancer. Neuromancer then brags about having manipulated you the entire time into doing its bidding, including taking out the other AIs so that it could assume control of the Matrix. As reductive as that sounds, that’s the plot.

Fans will note the obvious departures from the plot of the novel. While sure, along with Wintermute, Neuromancer, is an AI who manipulates a hacker into serving its cause, there’s quite a bit more nuisance in the original story that is simply left out of the game. While there are quite a few details from the book mentioned in the game, including numerous references to characters, events, companies, technologies, and places, they mostly feel like very surface-level references, or even homages to the original story, than anything resembling an adaptation.

“Dixie Flatline’s ROM-construct also makes an appearance… for some reason.”

Here’s my personal “headcanon” take on how the game’s story relates to that of the novel. First, if it’s not obvious, you’re not supposed to be playing Case, the main protagonist of the book, but a different character that just so happens to also be a down on his luck hacker living in Chiba City. Running in the same circles as Case, your character just so happens to interact with some of the same people and somehow wind up in some of the same places as he does. This character’s manipulation by Neuromancer, however, takes place before the events in the book, with Neuromancer attempting to level the playing field for itself before its more existential endgame in the novel. I think that works?

That all said, the story is presented as such an afterthought, that while it may disappoint those looking for a faithful adaptation of the plot of the novel, it didn’t have a major impact on my enjoyment of the game. It succeeds in giving us an interesting setting, at least.

Controls

In the more traditional offline “meatspace” adventure sections of the game, you’re presented with the typical third person view of your character in the immediate area you’re in. Navigating here is fairly rudimentary, with most screens only representing a single room with no scrolling or scaling as you move around. Moving is really only useful for navigating to an exit, as your character’s position is not typically a factor in being able to interact with people or objects. Similarly unsophisticated, each room tends to only have a single exit per side of the screen. Compared to most graphical adventure games, even much older ones, all of this might sound depressingly limited, but it somehow works just fine in practice.

“Being able to sell your organs for cash should be a standard feature in games.”

Your ability to move around in the UI tends to be more important, as you’ll be spending much more of your time interacting with it than the world around you, especially as the game progresses and you spend the majority of your time face down in your cyberdeck. There are a handful of menu options available at almost any time, most notably your skill and item inventories where the bulk of your actions derive from, as well as dedicated conversation and PAX access options that’ll you’ll be using a lot in the early game while still navigating the world. Anyone who is used to working in command line environments or other text based, hotkey driven programs should be able to pick up on it right away. While it’s a little archaic, the menu-heavy interface probably works better in the context of Neuromancer than other games from that era, and I found that it actually lead to feeling like I was really hacking around in these computer systems, adding greatly to my immersion in the gameworld.

Curiously enough for a game from 1988, I suppose as a nod to the newer, more mouse orientated 16-bit PCs, Neuromancer also includes fairly comprehensive mouse support. Along with performing some extremely basic “click to move” movement in the adventure sections, you can click menu and action buttons in the main UI overlay and most of the hotkey text options in the menus. Between typing in linkcodes and passwords and using the “Tell me about…” conversation option, which requires typing nouns into a simple text parser, I found it to be a lot more efficient just to get used to navigating the UI as well as moving my character strictly via keyboard so I wouldn’t need to keep switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse. Still, even if I didn’t use it, it’s neat that they decided to include it.

Graphics

Neuromancer’s graphics are a mixed bag. While it makes full use of EGA’s 320×200 resolution, packing a fair amount of detail into the world in addition to the descriptive text in the UI, and enough lines of text in the various interfaces to not feel too cramped, it
s default 16 color palette gives the graphics a harsh and primitive look that I, personally, don’t love. If you look carefully at the sprites and backgrounds, Interplay’s artists actually made damn fine use of the very limited palette, but that doesn’t stop the world from feeling drowned in otherworldly hues of cyan, purple, and green as typical of most EGA graphics. I admit, this is mostly a personal preference thing. While the animations aren’t anything to write home about either, the general art style and design of the world, despite not at all what I might have imagined when I read the book, have a distinct and enjoyable character for sure.

“Waking up in Chatsubo bar: Commodore 64.”

“Waking up in Chatsubo bar: IBM PC.”

“Waking up in Chatsubo bar: Amiga.”

Obviously rendered at a lower resolution than its IBM and Amiga counterparts, the stylization in the Commodore 64 version is totally different and, in my opinion, actually superior. Your character has a different hairstyle, resembling the character in the title screen rather than sporting a bizarre flattop. In fact, everything is different, with the amount of detail they managed to squeeze into its few pixels of backgrounds and sprites, including more variety into the otherwise plain PAX and base menus, it’s so much more charming. In comparison to the IBM PC version, the addition of more suitable colors is a vast improvement over characters’ ghoulish white skin and the stark EGA neons on display throughout. The Amiga version rectifies the IBM PC version’s weird color palette, looking more akin to a 90s VGA game, yet the stylization issues remain. While many people probably consider the Amiga port the definitive version, I’d definitely cast my vote for the C64.

Sound

Speaking of the Commodore 64, by 1988 it was a mature machine; developers had figured out ways to squeeze every ounce of potential out of it, including its legendary SID sound chip. Neuromancer is a great example of this all around, but its sound is a real head turner. For a C64 game it’s quite technologically impressive, featuring probably the first licensed, digitized soundtrack in a game. Devo’s “Some Things Never Change” provides the opening theme music, and a reworking of it provides occasional loops of in-game music. Of course, it mostly sounds like trash by today’s standards, but compared to the IBM PC version’s (admittedly catchy) blip-bloppy PC speaker rendition, it’s a huge step above. Even the Amiga version’s waveform composition of the track, while definitely an upgrade, is still a pale imitation of the C64 version.

“A rare, not-so-subtle hint… for dumb wilsons.”

On the other hand, despite each port of the game having some version of this track, it’s rarely played in-game and the rest of the sound effects are almost non-existent. Simple blips and blops for only a very few actions, and the rest of the time… total silence. Great!

Old Age

As usual, I played through the entirety of Neuromancer on my dedicated gaming 486, usually with my internal cache disabled to slow the processor down to 386-like speeds. There weren’t any major speed related issues I ran into with the game. Most noticeably, the scrolling text that appears in various menu interfaces throughout the game scrolls a little quicker than it should. I also ran into a problem where, with my cache enabled, my mouse clicks were often detected twice. This was an easy problem to work around by simply moving my cursor to a non-clickable part of the screen immediately after clicking a menu option, but it could still be annoying if you intend to use the mouse. Given those issues, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn of other speed related issues.

Beyond playing it on the real thing, it appears that the last couple of versions of DOSBox fully support Neuromancer, listing 100% compatibility with it. I never got around to trying it personally, but given its age and relatively simplicity, I’d certainly guess it would run absolutely perfect in DOSBox.

“Honesty is the best policy.”

Obtaining Neuromancer is another matter, however. Neuromancer exists firmly in the realm of abandonware these days. I know of absolutely no way to acquire it legally without finding a second hand copy of the physical release, and last time I checked eBay, prices were fairly outrageous. Fortunately, you can find the game on various shady abandonware sites quite easily. The more popular versions, like the Commodore 64 and Amiga ports, tend to be even more widespread, showing up on various enthusiast sites. I should point out that the game does include copy protection, originally coming with one of those annoying “code wheels” that you’d need to use to look up a keyword any time you access a PAX terminal. Of course, just about any version you download these days will already be cracked.

I’ve already talked quite a bit about some of the other versions of the game, but in addition to the awesome Commodore 64 version there is an Apple II port which has the same graphical style though, running at a lower resolution, looks a lot worse. Of course, it doesn’t include the digitized music either. Unusually, there’s also an Apple IIGS port. Very similar to the Amiga version, this one has the same graphical style including the higher color graphics, and similar waveform music and sound effects.

“It’s all just a game, after all…”

Scans of Neuromancer’s documentation are fairly widely available. Reading the manual isn’t necessarily required, but I’d recommend it due to it providing a good introduction to the story and overview of most of the game’s various systems. As usual, ReplacementDocs and Archive.org are places to start. There are also scans of the official hint book floating around. It’s kind of neat, written entirely as an in-character narrative, but I can’t recommend it as more than an interesting artifact since it’s an extremely linear walkthrough that removes any and all challenge from playing the game. I’d recommend at least trying to solve some of these puzzles yourself.

Sequels and Related Games

For what seems like the first time in one of these retro reviews, there are absolutely none. There were no sequels, and to my knowledge there are no other games based on Neuromancer. While you could possibly point to some of Interplay’s other games from around this time as related games, to my knowledge, none of them are directly related to Neuromancer’s engine or play anything like Neuromancer. Yet again, living up to my statement about it being unique.

Closing

Since, as mentioned, Neuromancer and its sequels are some of my favorite books and the game itself is a potent mix of a lot of my favorite elements, I’m definitely glad I played through this. On the other hand, unless you find yourself as similarly drawn to it as I was, it’s hard to recommend. The game is definitely interesting, with its unique mix of adventure, roleplaying, and hacking gameplay, and I haven’t played too many games that feel intimidatingly large and open, yet progress in such a fairly logical and linear way. Yet, the actual mechanics, from the simple implementation of the adventure game sections, to the repetitive and not particularly deep cyberspace ICE and AI battles, don’t quite stand out enough. Even though the Commodore 64 version in particular was technically impressive at the time, the game isn’t particularly historically significant either. If it’s simply the cyberpunk setting you’re after, there are games that pull off the atmosphere better, or you perhaps you could just cut out the middleman and check out the book!

I don’t usually cite sources when putting together these reviews due to the sheer amount of reviews, articles, walkthroughs, and other material that I read while working on them. That said, this awesome article about the history of Neuromancer’s development is just too fascinating not to share.