![]() Yet the ten-stage taster of the FPS world from Apogee (that’s nine levels and a secret bonus level) was the first to really take things up a notch, and it showed me a whole new world. We used to huddle around his dad’s ageing PC in his parents’ bedroom, playing all sorts of stuff, like The Crystal Maze or Jill of the Jungle. My best friend, Richard, introduced me to the shareware-gifted Episode 1 of Wolf3D: Escape from Castle Wolfenstein. That is to say, a shockingly high figure for games you can now buy for under £1. Shareware was a simple proposition: play the first part and, if you enjoyed it, you could go to a holding screen within the game and send off an order form to some random office block in the US, along with a cheque for a surprisingly high amount. Yet back in the early 90s, if the word “shareware” was stuck onto your three-and-a-half-incher, you knew you’d have unrestricted access to plenty of hard and frantic fun. Whether that was being limited to bombing around Gare d’Europa in a Feisar to CoLD SToRAGE’s Body in Motion on Wipeout 2097, enjoying the Net Yaroze Hall of Fame on Official PlayStation Magazine’s demo 42, or dashing through the epic, famous, ten-minute run-through of Resident Evil 2, you got a great taste of the game… but just not quite enough. While modern games now regularly allow time-restricted access to the full game before you have to buy them – and, with the likes of modern Telltale games, you’ll be given a whole episode of a series for free – demos, historically speaking, only gave you a brief insight into the biggest hits of the day. In the case of Wolfenstein 3D – the first-ever first-person shooter I (and many others) ever played – it literally opened out in front of you. In those days, all you needed was a floppy disk drive, and in a matter of moments, a whole new world opened out in front of you. Games were expensive and hinged massively on how good your PC was – the early 90s, you’ve got to remember, was a time when hardware capabilities were improving exponentially. Like me, my mates were too young to have consoles of their own, but many at least had family computers. I had to plan in advance for any gaming session so-called “instant gaming” was experienced solely through my friends’ greater technological fortunes. Even terrifyingly crap titles like BC Bill took upwards of four hours.Īnd so I spent a lot of my time outdoors, cycling circuits around the block and waiting for the cassettes to do their duty. Sadly, whatever I played, I’d have to wait a minimum of 15 minutes for them to load, and that’s if the tape didn’t jam. While most of its games seemed tedious, insanely difficult or downright unplayable, there were a few I just couldn’t get enough of – International Karate and Shinobi were particular standouts. I was without anything approaching “cutting edge” for a good few years, but I learned to work the C64 surprisingly quickly. Your mission is to infiltrate the heavily guarded Nazi stronghold and recapture the Spear of Destiny before it’s too late.In my earliest days of gaming, I only had access to an inherited Commodore 64 and a broken ZX Spectrum. According to legend, no man can be defeated when he wields the spear. During the German Blitzkrieg of World War II, the spear that pierced the side of Christ is stolen from Versailles by the Nazis and secured in Castle Nuremberg. In this prequel to Wolfenstein 3D, you are William “B.J.” Blazkowicz, the Allies' most valuable agent.
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