Civvie 11 - Retro FPS Boomer

[LightDragonman1]

Man, I forgot how good Prey 2006 was. Definitely one of the more underrated games from that time period.

Also, since he mentioned Raven Software in the vid, I wonder if he'll ever get to reviewing Quake 4? In my honest opinion, I think that is my favorite of all the id Tech 4 games, and consider it to also be quite an underrated shooter. Heck, it is arguably even more of a Biopunk work than even Prey.

 

[X Pac Heat]

I remember playing the Prey demo on 360. I'm pretty sure it was like a quarter of the game tbqh if it's true the game is only like 5 hours long. It was a loooong ass demo.

Never got around to buying Prey and playing it all the way through though. Don't know why.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

it is a well made game with good gunplay, but Prey's aesthetic stopped me wanting to play it more than once. There is absolutely a place for serious and dark moments in games, but this just felt mean spirited and unpleasant. Plus the environments looked like footage of a colonic irrigation.

 

[Gravemind]

I remember playing the Prey demo on 360. I'm pretty sure it was like a quarter of the game tbqh if it's true the game is only like 5 hours long. It was a loooong ass demo.

Never got around to buying Prey and playing it all the way through though. Don't know why.

I remember seeing it amid a friend's 360 collection back when we were younger and borrowing it off of him for a bit. Think we traded: Ninja Gaiden for Prey, which was surprising because he was incredibly fucking stubborn to beat this action game that was stomping the shit out of him and that's normally not his preferred genre.

Color me absolutely fucking floored by how the game was basically like Doom 3, but with way cooler setpieces and no actual "deaths". Made me wonder why nobody ever really talked about it.

 

[BrunoMattei]

I never got into it. The lack of punishment for dying was a big turn off. Sure, there's quicksaves but the lack of actual punishment for death is something I just don't like.

I didn't like the reboot game either.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I've wondered through the video why I didn't hear about the game, and then the "took 5 hours to finish" bit in the end answered it all. Unless you have a multiplayer mode to justify the price tag then the game is likely to fade away.

 

[BrunoMattei]

I've wondered through the video why I didn't hear about the game, and then the "took 5 hours to finish" bit in the end answered it all. Unless you have a multiplayer mode to justify the price tag then the game is likely to fade away.

And there was no multiplayer. Not that that you could do much with it anyway other then generic DM shit.

 

[TLS]

Unless you have a multiplayer mode to justify the price tag then the game is likely to fade away.

And there was no multiplayer.

There was multiplayer though, as evidenced by this Youtube video from 2006:

 

[Corn Flakes]

For a project cobbled together from the bodyparts of at least two other previous projects, and likely made on a shoestring budget, Prey is pretty fantastic. As a game? It's short, gross, kind of clunky in places (I don't usually have motion sickness, but the gravity fuckery made me woozy when I played it), and it's clearly trying to pack a whole novel's worth of content into a front-and-back trifold brochure.

It's nice that Civvie played a game that he unironically enjoyed, but Prey is still not a great game.

 

[BrunoMattei]

There was multiplayer though, as evidenced by this Youtube video from 2006:

Honestly shocked.

 

[Notgoodwithusernames]

Goddamn I remember back when I first got a game informer subscription in 2011. One of the first issues mailed to me featured a bit on prey 2 and it sounded so fucking cool

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

I really wanted to play Prey, but by the time I got a computer I could actually play games on, it was removed from Steam. Thankfully, boxed copies are a thing, so I might just go that route if I want to try it out.

 

[Kane Lives]

Man, I forgot how good Prey 2006 was. Definitely one of the more underrated games from that time period.

Also, since he mentioned Raven Software in the vid, I wonder if he'll ever get to reviewing Quake 4? In my honest opinion, I think that is my favorite of all the id Tech 4 games, and consider it to also be quite an underrated shooter. Heck, it is arguably even more of a Biopunk work than even Prey.

Quake 4 was basically a pretty good mil-sci shooter of the late 00s, if formulaic by that point. Certainly beats the mud and brown modern warfare clones of that era.

 

[The tired cat]

Quake 4 was basically a pretty good mil-sci shooter of the late 00s, if formulaic by that point. Certainly beats the mud and brown modern warfare clones of that era.

I think the only thing that sold Quake 4 was the amount of body horror you'd get in it, which I'd kinda walked circles around Prey.

 

[biophonic]

If there's one thing that annoys me about Civvie, it's his blind belief off "Oh, the game devs are innocent! It's always dem greedy publishers that are to blame!" because I'm having high doubts that Prey 2 was any better than Prey 1 or was infact complete, especially when you look at what a disjointed mess Prey 1 was.

To be fair to Civvie, Prey 1 was developed by multiple development teams from 1995 to 2001 before Human Head Studios picked it up and started development. The game engine they used for Prey was ID Tech 4 which got released publicly in 2004. The engine build (assuming ID Software shared the engine with Human Head Studios) was around 3-4 years of actual development, so the reason why prey was short and disjointed was because at that point. There was several builds by a couple different developers from 3d realms including tom hall's dev team and Human Head most likely had to scrap several builds before they settled on ID Tech, so it's an achievement IMO that the game came out as a decent FPS title and not Daikatana 2.0

 

[Mr. Duck]

Also, since he mentioned Raven Software in the vid, I wonder if he'll ever get to reviewing Quake 4? In my honest opinion, I think that is my favorite of all the id Tech 4 games, and consider it to also be quite an underrated shooter. Heck, it is arguably even more of a Biopunk work than even Prey.

I predict that he will be rather harsh to it for being a Quake title with some military shooter elements, IMO the gameplay is rather slow until you get stroggified, still a good game though.

 

[LightDragonman1]

I predict that he will be rather harsh to it for being a Quake title with some military shooter elements, IMO the gameplay is rather slow until you get stroggified, still a good game though.

I get that feeling too.

To be honest, I agree that the first third is really slow and kind of mediocre. Not only because of how slowly your character moves as a Marine, but also because the setting feels like every other standard military sci-fi game of that era, and you don't get the more interesting weapons and are stuck with the very basic ones.

However, the reason I still love the game is because after the Stroggofication sequence, the game kicks into full gear and doesn't let up. Now you move at a much faster pace, the cool weapons and upgrades start churning in rapidly, the levels become much more complex and varied, and the setting takes a shift from the generic run-of-the-mill sci-fi army motif, and pretty much becomes a full on Biopunk work, even more so than Prey 2006.

I hope that, should he review it, he at least doesn't let the slow start taint his view of the awesome other two thirds.

 

[Overcast]

I forgot how fucking good Prey 2006 was. Yeah, the lack of punishment for death did remove the challenge, but for this game, I could let it slide as the whole thing was pretty novel.

Weapons were creative, there was plenty of body horror and gross shit, and it wasn't often you had a game that had a Native American lead and integrate their culture and heritage into the game's themes and mechanics. I don't even remember if they made a particularly big deal about it back then, as I could see a shit ton of people nowadays shilling for the game simply because he happens to be a minority. Back then, people would have just simply said, "Huh, neat. Now where's my guns?" and left it at that.

Not the greatest shooter out there, but it really did deserve more love.

 

[The tired cat]

To be fair to Civvie, Prey 1 was developed by multiple development teams from 1995 to 2001 before Human Head Studios picked it up and started development. The game engine they used for Prey was ID Tech 4 which got released publicly in 2004. The engine build (assuming ID Software shared the engine with Human Head Studios) was around 3-4 years of actual development, so the reason why prey was short and disjointed was because at that point. There was several builds by a couple different developers from 3d realms including tom hall's dev team and Human Head most likely had to scrap several builds before they settled on ID Tech, so it's an achievement IMO that the game came out as a decent FPS title and not Daikatana 2.0

Let's be real, the only way it would have become Daikatana 2.0 if they hyped up like crazy and then kept pushing the release further and further. This game dropped off the radar until 2006, and by that point, everyone forgot about it because it barely made much of an impact back in 1995 even.

 

[Pig Boss]

Finally watched the Prey video, I didn't play the original game but anything that opens with Blue Oyster Cult can't be bad, right? Like the 90's Stand TV mini, that also opened with BOC- Don't Fear the Reaper and it was great. I'll probably pick up a copy for the weekend, as usual Civvie sells me on something I'd never even considered playing prior to his video, the man is determined to turn me into a consoomer.