Gloom Deluxe and Gloom 3: "Ultimate Gloom" Zombie Edition (Amiga) - Guest Post

Poor mecha-neko has apparently lost his long battle with insanity, after finally taking one too many crappy video games to the head. He claims he's receiving messages from the internet telling him to play more first person shooters on the Amiga, and worse he's actually playing them.

The SAIG postbag has been inundated with folks saying that I had Gloom on the wrong settings, played the wrong Gloom or that I didn't play it long enough. You only ever get the opportunity to steal top billing from Deus Ex once, so it's time for an amazing Gloom special!

This is the third game, Gloom 3... except it's really the fourth game. And there's another one after it, but that one isn't really Gloom and neither were the two in between Gloom and this one. And there's no version of this one that isn't a 'Zombie Edition'. And it's also called Ultimate Gloom.

And we're not playing this one first.

We're playing this one first. Gloom Deluxe. As far as I can tell, this is the sequel to Gloom.

Oh, it's you again. A little less squashed, your eyes are glowing green, and you're drooling now, but you're still the same old completely absent demon dude. How've you been?

This picture still doesn't make sense to me. You're playing as the guy on the left, fighting the guys on the right. You're wearing the same uniforms... so perhaps the enemy soldiers were zombies in the other game? Or you're infiltrating their base?

What... oh, right. Set graphics to maximum!

This is certainly very familiar except I've got a gun instead of a chin!

Yeah, I'd recognise this anywhere...

It's Gloom, but not on the Game Boy Color!

You're seeing pulse-churning action spewed into your eyes at a skull-melting 640x480! Can you handle it?

I can't begin to imagine the type of Amiga you'd need to play this game properly at the time, or how much it would have cost.

What can I say? The title screen and level intro music is the same and there's still no music ingame. There's really loud footsteps and everything seems to run (very smoothly) in slow motion.

Oh would you look at that, I turned it off. Oh dear.

Hmm...

On the main menu, when I started a new game, it gave me the alternative option 'Continue From The Gothic Tomb'. Is this an extra 'episode' added onto the end of Gloom Deluxe?

Believe it or not, there's still no savegames or passwords anywhere in Gloom Deluxe, so maybe they put a 'skip half the game' option in as a sort of compromise. (Hey, developers, if you can't be bothered with saves or passwords, just ask us what level we want to play. You can trust us! Honest!)

RAPTOR MADNESS IN THE GOTHIC TOMB!

Now that's how you name a level!

This is way more interesting than that dull green base you start off in! They should have started the game here! I suppose they technically just did, but shut up.

Waaaaaah! Kremlings!

The sprint up to me in two frames of animation, legs flickering about the place like the guys from Death Mask.

It's easier to kill these guys than the soliders because they don't have a gun. They're still hiding behind every single corner.

I'll give you one guess as to what these guys did when I fired my antimatter fireballs at them. I'll give you a clue, it rhymes with 'mexplode'.

One shot from my mega-uber gun and the spooky ghost disappears instantly. Did I get him?

It's still no easier to shoot these guys than it was before. I'm dead. Guess I'll never get to see those raptors. Or that demon guy from the title screen. I cheated and looked up the ending on VGMuseum, you know. The final boss is a green two headed dragon!

Gloom Deluxe is the deluxe version of Gloom, like Poop Deluxe is the deluxe version of, well...

Hey! Let's play a completely different game!

1997 was a good year for first person shooters. It was the year that gave us GoldenEye: 007 and Quake II. And it was the year that gave us...

Gloom 3: "Ultimate Gloom" Zombie Edition

We have an intro! It's complete with a narrator reading aloud the plot. Yes, speech! In an Amiga game! Turn down the lights and prepare for the five mind-breaking minutes of some Geordie bloke speaking into the world's cheapest microphone.

My favourite part is when the narrator describes your character's encounter with the mysterious puppet-masters of the Gloom-verse, the 'seven old men dressed in grey'. He puts on voices. (YouTube link) I fell right out of my chair when he delivered the ultimatum "DO YOU ACCEPT?" in what sounds like a gargly Muppet-like voice.

As the narrator reads out the text, the zombie picture smartly fades out and the text scrolls up the screen in an easy to read fashion, giving a very professional gloss to the silly narration.

Just kidding!

Alrighty. Same old Gloom formula. Still picture. Violence model 'Nasty' or 'Dirty' (I went with 'Dirty'). Different music this time.

That's absolutely the crappest gun I've seen so far in all of FPS Friday. It's badly drawn... badly shaded... badly scaled! What the hell happened there? Did they think that re-using the Gloom Deluxe gun or perhaps changing its palette slightly would be cheating? They used the same interface and that wasn't cheating!

Ooooh... scary stuff!

No music, slow movement and very loud footsteps. Is this Gloom more of a horror game?

Zombies! Shoot 'em, Gloomguy, shoot 'em!

These zombies have no frames of animation. They just slide right on up to you. Unlike Gloom's hordes of soldier guys, the zombies don't shoot you, so you're able to back away from them and keep firing without taking any damage (provided you don't back away into a zombie).

Ugh, still no autofire. These zombies take at least half a dozen shots each to take down (explode). I'm going to break the pad at this rate.

The soldiers from Gloom Deluxe are back and this time they're zombies! This means they do a hell of a lot more damage and they can shoot you. Hooray.

"Help... me..."

I can't help you if you're going to shoot me, ghost! Wait, 'ghost'? A... zombie ghost?

Zombie ghosts can walk through walls and can shoot fireballs and are nearly invisible, which makes them awful fiends. They die in one hit, but you're not very sturdy yourself. Lose a life and your 'gun' is back to useless-power.

JESUS CHRIST IT'S A HUGE FUCKING FACE.

I'm so startled by the huge fucking face that I totally lose my bearings as it floats towards me and eats me alive in seconds.

Tackling the huge face requires new tactics. It's easy to deal with zombies or soldiers if you have a big enough corridor to back away down, but the huge face sucks you towards him if you leave him alone, so you have to get the zombies in line with the face and pull backwards otherwise you're going to be quickly eaten.

Woo, Gloom... out of all the Glooms, this is probably my favourite. You meet several different types of enemies in succession and each appear to do different things, even if they are all cheating turds. It's nice to see a level other than Gloom's green base. I think I'm being unusually easy on this game because running straight into the huge face was such a stupid shock the first time, it put me in a good mood for the rest of the game.

I assumed the huge face was an end-of-level boss, but there's multiple copies of him later on and I got kinda sick of him. Waitaminnit! That stupid face is Bub from Day of the Dead! (external link) TSK TSK TSK.

Maybe somebody with infinite time on their hands and an unhealthy urge to play very difficult, very obscure games would actually enjoy Gloom 3: Zombie Edition for real.

One last thing before I can finally say goodbye to the Gloom series once and for all.

Gloom: Special Edition

Somewhere between Gloom and G3: ZE / UG lies Gloom Deluxe, the updated version of Gloom with the 1 by 1 pixel mode and the gun on screen. If that's filling the position of Gloom 2, when what on earth is Gloom: Special Edition?

Oh God, it's Gloom Deluxe, except with the zombie soldiers and crappy Crayola-borne gun (looking even WORSE!) of Gloom 3! It's even got the zombie intro picture and plot of Gloom 3, but no speech. How does this game relate to the rest? Is this a work in progress demo showing how Gloom 3 will be made from Gloom Deluxe? Is it some kind of zombie mod for Gloom? If so, why isn't this one Gloom Deluxe: Zombie Edition?

I think the universe observed the Gloom series as a terrible, terrible mistake and employed desperate measures in an attempt to remove it from existence forever. Unfortunately, it only partially worked, and we're left with several shattered pieces of terrible half-game. Don't touch it. The cleaners will be here momentarily.