Retrospective: Shadow Warrior Comments by Will Porter

I have very faint memories of having very fun with this game in the past. Those were the FPS gaming heydays.

This game was fun.

Re: it not being allowed today. Isn't Postal being developed? That's even worse.

Yeahhh, I had the demo back in the day on my Pentium 166. I beat the damn demo so many times, I actually REMEMBER all the specific crap referred to in this article. Nothing could beat the sword fighting, naked anime tits, and random ass remote control cars that you could use to blow shit up to get secrets. No lie, after playing the demo, I started saying "ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET" in that terribly racist accent whenever my Chinese friends would do shit, and it was the funniest thing ever in high school. Unfortunately, I now live in hell, where Jesus punishes me for all my sins.

Shame that this is so overlooked. It's as good as Duke Nukem 3D.

Remember Rise of the Triad? that had super bouncey flying jump things!

and TekWar...yes it was rubbish, but it was kind of an open world fps where you could pick up chairs and throw them at hospital patients!

We going through all the Build engine games, Will? Bet Exhumed's next. :P

I missed Shadow Warrior when it first came round, and I've been bitterly regretting it for a while now. I've never seen the damn thing in any used games shop for years. I'm hoping that GOG will have it soon.

I loved all the little side jokes in it. The best one that I can remember was finding Jackie Chan's grave.

I think I still have my copy kicking around somewhere. I should play it again.

God I used to love this game, i remember playing this ALLOT back in the day and the multiplayer was excellent.

"Ah, Sticky bomb like you!"

The Monty python rabbit was a fun bonus, vicious little bastard, but It was fun shooting a nuke at it :D

The underwater base level was great, and features possibly the only occurrence of a controllable vacuum cleaner in a game (which you can actually used to clean up a room)

A whole article on this and you didn't even mention the nuke?

The cover looks exactly like Duke 3D

The sword slashing was quite satisfying back in the day.

You never heard the queer bunnies line? There were several points where there were male and female rabbits (the males were brown and the females were white) running around in the same area. If you left them alone they'd randomly mate with each other and then a new rabbit would pop out. After 5 minutes or so there'd be 20-30 of the little guys. And there was a chance that a male rabbit would go for another male one, which is where that line came out.

How can a chap acquire this game nowadays?

>How can a chap acquire this game nowadays?

You can buy it still from 3drealms.. or get it by non legit means

.. be sure to download the "hi-res" mods though...

Wow, surprised this game popped up again. This is simply my favourite first person shooter along with the other Build engine games Blood, Redneck Rampage and Duke Nukem 3D.The level design and atmosphere of these games have simply not been beaten since. Only The Darkness has come close in recent memory.

I remember Shadow Warrior & Quake II side by side on the store shelf, Quake II may have had the new fancy lighting effects but Shadow Warrior was the natural choice for me (although Quake II would later become my sole online multiplayer gaming experience for a number of years).

One of the bits from this game that stood out in my mind was where you find lara croft chained to a wall, if you hacked her to pieces with your swords he said something like 'aha the last tomb raider!'

I'm glad you mentioned Future Shock because I was going to. Not just for the fact it had vehicles, but because it was well ahead of its time in many areas (true polygonal graphics mixed with 2D sprites courtesy of Bethesda's XnGine, one of the first mouse + keyboard control schemes, grenades mapped to a separate button, every building having an interior you could enter...), but sadly forgotten. Now that would be a good fit for a future retrospective.

I thought Shadow Warrior was a fun game, but I can't say I ever saw anything special in it. That said, I played it several years after its original release. I still hate those damn charging monkeys, or what ever they were.

this game was alot of fun when it first came out.

one thing that always stuck in my head was a piss take of tomb raider, cant remember what even was now but i know there was one.

By the way, Hexen was probably the first FPS game I thought had enjoyable melee combat.

"How can a chap acquire this game nowadays? "

Had a bit of a look around and none of my usual sites have it. I reckon that they will soon add it though. GOG has been steadily expanding.

However, in it's absence you can find it at the usual torrent sites.

One Of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. Legend.

Never really played this one much, I was more a Blood man myself. May hunt this down and take another look.

insane_cobra,

Yeah I was glad Future Shock got a mention as well and I thought the same thing. At the time I remember being really impressed by the lazer scope in that game, definitely ahead of its time in many ways.

http://www.proasm.com/

The shareware version is available from the 3d realms website. It runs fine in dosbox. Requires some tweaking of controls ;-)

Loved this game. I enjoyed this, Blood and Redneck Rampage more than Duke Nukem.

I liked when you found a second uzi. "Be proud Mr Woo".

Who wanta some Wang?

Great game, the sprites did seem like a throwback with Quake and Terminator having full poly enemies and the design wasn't nearly half as good as Duke, or Blood, but it was still funny.

I had no idea this even existed. I feel enlightened!

+1 for Future Shock retrospective. It really was quite something, as was its multiplayer follow-up, Skynet.

Blood was much, much, much better than both Duke and Shadow Warrior combined, talk about that instead! It had a ground breaking level set on a train! And flare guns!

YOU NO MESS WITH LO WANG!

Man who fart in church sit on own pew

Top stuff, just had an hour at it, using http://www.proasm.com.

I knew there was a reason to keep all my old Build games :D

Missed this one... I remember Exhumed though!

I remember trying the share ware demo just before it came out, and whilst it was fun I don't recall being all that enamoured by it. Simply because there were better games out than this at the time and after Duke it just seemed like more of the same and a bit tired.

This and Blood, another Build engine game, came out at pretty much the same time, and I always remember Blood being the better of the two. Well I bought Blood and I didn't buy Shadow Warrior.

Slice and dice: the earliest enjoyable melee combat on record.

Wtf?

blood is better than Duke 3d and Shadow warrior combined. Nothing beats blood.

*edit* skip the rubbish expansions though.

Its still sitting on the shelf infront of me :D

Despite reading the article I'm not sure why the writer picked Shadow Warrior. I enjoyed the game, but it didn't add that much new to the genre. Blood and Rise of the Triads were also quality... although the latter had sloppy level design. But Heretic and Hexen were far more appealing to me and I'm not even into my fantasy games.

And was it really racist? May be I was too young to appreciate it if it was, but even looking back it seems like it was just hamming up a particular setting. At a young age I didn't see anything negative about the Far Eastern environment and I certainly didn't think it was what China and Japan were really like. In fact, with all the guns I felt it had more of a Hollywood setting.

Ouch! Ouch! WHO PUT THESE HERE!



Also: I'm sick and tired of hearing people cry about whatever the hell is considered "offensive" this particular weekday.

Lo Wang come for you, you snake coward!!

edit: gotta love the 3d realms intro quotes. SW was a close second to "those alien bastards are gonna pay for shootin up my ride"

And another one of the remarkable things about it is that its Build engine was made by Ken Silverman when he was really young. I mean *really* young. Makes me think I'm throwing my life down the drain whenever I remember that fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman

"Despite reading the article I'm not sure why the writer picked Shadow Warrior. "

At least it goes farther back than Earth Defense Force 2017. ;)

Had some fun times with Shadow Warrior, especially in multiplayer. The deathmatch level with the controllable tank was pretty awesome.

It's certainly true that the game was regarded as somewhat old-fashioned at the time of its release, but I agree with Will Porter that it was a very competent FPS with many laudable features (I remember being impressed even by little things like the 3D flags waving in the wind).

I'm not too sure that the kind of tongue-surgically-planted-in-cheek racial stereotyping and sexism seen in Shadow Warrior couldn't appear in a game today, though. As far as the sexploitation goes, I can't see that the industry as a whole has matured that much (Onechanbra Bikini Zombie Slayers, Bayonetta, X-Blades, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 2 anyone?). African-Americans frequently get portrayed as Saint's Row-style badasses, and the Resident Evil 5 controversy (whatever side you're on) shows that even recent AAA titles got elements in them which many thoughtful observers have interpreted as pretty racist stuff...