TekWar

[Discoalucard]

www.hardcoregaming101.net/tekwar/tekwar.htm

To accompany the Game Club 199X livecast, here's a review of TekWar, the shoddy Capstone FPS based on the shoddy "William Shatner" book/TV series.

[GamerL]

lol I saw a copy of the hardcover book in a used book store I visited when I was in North Carolina on vacation in June, now I regret not buying it for a laugh 

[dskzero]

I've always wanted to play this game but I have enough crap on my backlog to even think it. It's more because I had the demo once back then and the game refused to run properly and it was fascinanting at the time to watch somewhat realistic environments and vehicles on the streets.

[Snarboo]

I've done a lot of behind the scenes research for this game for the podcast, and it does seem like a lot of content was cut or rushed. For example, you originally equipped the grenades in your hand to use them, but in the final game you pick them up with spacebar and throw them with enter. Also, according to a strategy guide Mister Argent found, the Accu Trac supposedly improves your aim, but given autoaim is on by default, I'm not sure that's true! This is on top of all the changes they made after the demo release, which seems to have a lot of cut or changed content hidden in the data files.

It should be noted that the source code for this game was released a couple years ago, but no one has done anything with it yet. A shame since I think it could be made to be playable with tweaks.

[zerker]

dskzero: You can have my copy for the price of $0 (+ shipping)

Though it's probably going to find its way to Goodwill pretty soon...

As for the article: pretty great summary of everything wrong with the game. Two complaints I had that weren't in the article if you wanted to include them:
1) The automap is already filled in, so it is difficult to determine where you have and haven't been on a given map. It also spoils the layout sometimes: the isolated office in the corner of the map is PROBABLY where the Teklord is. I actually ended up complaining about this twice on IRC to my shame

2) It's not clear which corporation requires which Symbol in the Matrix (and the selection isn't in quite the same order as the Teklord selection). Unless this is in the 'full' manual that nobody seems to have (and no scans exist that I can find), you run the risk of playing a corporation area to completion only to find out you don't even have the key for that area yet.

[zerocrescent]

Oh dear, this game. I still remember my brother and I picking this up at Fry's many many years ago. I think it was a bargain bin special that came with the BradyGames strategy guide. A combination of being fans of Doom and the fancy box art encouraged the purchase, though I think there was a demo available that we tried. To the devs' credit, there were some interesting ideas at work for an FPS game from 1995 that attempted to keep it from being another "me-too Doom clone." For one, you had the draw/holster key and the neutral zones (train stations, outside areas, populated with Police and Civilian NPCs), where you couldn't draw and fire your weapon without drawing police attention. I believe we got most of our entertainment value from these areas; popping into a train station to cause random mayhem, ride the train, mess around in the bathrooms, and see how far we could push things in those zones, especially with the easy-to-access God Mode and All Weapons cheat. Of course, the reason most of the game's entertainment came from random mayhem was that proceeding through the game as intended was nothing short of a chore.

I remember the first time we found and beat the first TekLord (Frankly, watching Youtube videos of the level now, I'm surprised we figured out how to get to him; it probably took a lot of trial-and-error to find the keycard holders). We found his little room, shot him, and then were treated to a video of Shatner... chewing us out. The mission was technically completed, but we were still puzzled (as we didn't kill any civilians), until we saw a blurb in the manual or strategy. You see, if I'm remembering this correctly, the game has a stupidly strict no-killing rule that even extends to the henchmen that shoot at you. To satisfy this rule, you are expected to take down any human enemies with your stun gun ("kills" from the stun gun don't count as kills). That blurb was something like (paraphrasing) "The Tek Terrorists are innocent too, they're slaves to the TekLords because of their Tek addiction!" It's an amazing lesson in bad game design: the game lets you build up an arsenal, then, through Shatner chewing you out if you kill even one Tek Terrorist, pretty much tells you that you can only use that arsenal on turrets and TekLords.

Then there was the first time we saw the Matrix levels after reading about them in the strategy guide. It was already mentioned in the article, but they were a complete mess, with disorienting graphics, no idea of where to go and what to do, and a bunch of confusing things that could readily kill you.

Despite positive memories of screwing around in the neutral zones, this game was definitely a terrible one when you moved past those zones.

[vnisanian2001]

Can't believe TekWar aired on USA Network. At a time when that channel was worth watching.

[ant]

I played its demo(nstration) when I was a teen(ager) on one of my IBM PCs. It was crap!