Friday, 15 July 2022

Crusader: No Remorse (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, guest reviewer mecha-neko is writing words about Crusader: No Remorse, the first of the two Crusader games! Or is Crusader: No Regret the first one and this the sequel? How do you even tell?

Crusader No Remorse title screen
Developer:Origin Systems|Release Date:1995|Systems:MS-DOS, PlayStation

While Ray's playing Wing Commander, here's another legendary DOS Origin Systems game that I haven't played yet!

Are you ready for some isometric tactical espionage action?



DATE: 2196.2 WEC
REBEL INSTALLATION | ECHO SECTOR
ENGAGEMENT POST-OP ROUTINE


Once upon a time, in a sewer, there were three Boba Fetts. There's ZUROVEK, ANTON, VITEK, MARCUS and me, ERROR 492, at least according to the cameras watching us.

We've just come back from a frustrating mission where we were sent to kill a bunch of rebels, but everybody we found was unarmed so we let them go. ANTON and MARCUS are freaking out a little bit since they've realised that when when you live in a setting where there's posters up everywhere saying things like 'FREEDOM THROUGH CONFORMITY', when the boss says 'kill the rebels' he probably means 'kill the everyone'.

While those two are arguing about what to tell the boss so we don't get executed, ERROR notices something creeping up behind us.

ERROR dives to the ground just in time, but it's too late for his squad, gunned down by an ED-209 they never saw coming.

ED-209 versus Boba Fett! It's the crossover we've all been waiting for!

Everything goes quiet, and then a grenade leaps out of the sewer and comes to a stop beside ED-209's feet. Boooom!

The surviving member of the death squad towers over the remains of the robot and silently vows revenge on the corrupt state he once belonged to. I mean I assume he does, since he's silent like I said.

Main menu!

I had a bit of trouble getting Crusader started. Not because the installer was broken or anything like that, but because the sound test music is really awesome, as is the main menu music. (YouTube links)

It's a shame that the installation only takes half a minute because I wouldn't mind listening to that music for a lot longer. And that main menu music with its sampled guitars and pristine synth pads and chimes would get anyone psyched for some sci-fi defection revenge shooter action. It reminds me of the menu music from Space Crusade on the Amiga, or the track Act on Instinct from Command & Conquer.

There are four difficulty levels: "Mama's Boy", "Weekend Warrior", "Loose Cannon" and "No Remorse". I picked "Weekend Warrior". Let's begin the game!

In lieu of anything better to do, the Silencer (my character's name/rank, so says the box) has got himself an e-mail address and sent off a job application to the rebels he was just sent to gun down.

Also isn't this the logo of New World Computing, publishers of Inherit The Earth and Might & Magic among other things?

Heeey! Live action full motion video mission briefing! I thought we were going to get some more pre-rendered figures if anything, but this is lovely. Hello there, Maxis! (Not to be confused with Macil from Strife, who is also a rebel commander!)

This video, like the intro, has black scanlines running through it (like Psychic Detective), but I've taken them out for these screenshots. If you want to see the original scanlines, get some of those retro kitsch sunglasses with the horizontal bars for lenses.

Also this is the earliest game I've played with optional subtitles! Too bad the subtitles summarise the dialogue instead of directly quoting it, which makes things confusing when you're trying to follow both at once.

I had to try real hard to find a normal-looking frame of Maxis' briefing, because....

... most of the time he looks like he just sat on a pineapple.

My mission is to go to a refinery owned by our enemies, the Consortium (surely not that Consortium!), receive a keycard from an informant, plant an explosive, and escape via teleporter.

He wishes me luck, but doesn't go so far as to say "and show them No Remorse™", which is a missed opportunity.

Ooh, oooh, ick. This isn't good. Playing Crusader for the first time is like plunging your hands into cold slime. The Silencer's got tank controls and nothing feels right at all. The music is all action, but the Silencer would rather take his time and intimidate his enemies with a confident strut.

"You're not supposed to be here!" yells the man to the right, who calmly walks over to the alert panel and activates it then puts his hands up, as if that's the safest order to do things when a heavily armed bottle of ketchup materialises out of nowhere and points a gun in your direction. It's a bit of an under-reaction.

I'm a disgraced member of an elite death squad, still wearing my distinctive armour, who's reappeared out of nowhere at one of my former employer's facilities to shoot up the place. It's like if Darth Vader got kicked out the Empire for being too wet, and then somehow showed up on the Death Star the next day to collect his stuff. It would be an alarming event.

Get 'em, not-Boba!

That could've gone worse. The aiming is very forgiving: you only need to aim roughly in the direction of an enemy to blast 'em. I don't understand why sometimes a lock-on reticule appears over an enemy, and sometimes it doesn't. You can't shoot and move so this might be as flashy and frantic as Crusader's combat gets. It's a real-time action game but the stilted animations make everything look turn-based, like I planned my moves in advance and we're watching them being executed.

Running... sucks. The Silencer and his pre-rendered frames are awful and stiff and nothing like the wobbly freedom of Little Big Adventure. Not that LBA was fantastic, but being able to go in all directions made Twinsen's tank controls much more comfortable. The jolts in the Silencer's animation aren't due to the way I'm capturing the game, that's just how Crusader looks. You sort of catch on walls and things when you get close to them and flicker about.

Agh! Spotted by a security camera! They did a great job making it completely indistinguishable from the wall. Luckily (and surprisingly), my starting gun can damage the concealed turrets. The poor engineer behind me got shot in the back before I could turn around and do anything about it. Sorry, dude.

Enemy robot! He looks like he's about to menacingly slowly stack some coloured blocks in my direction, so I open fire. What a lovely, full-colour, high-resolution, cheesy as hell explosion!

I hope I find some ammo soon, I'm almost out. What? You can't see the ammo counter? It's right there in the bottom-left-middle, of course!

Right. Up the lift then? I have no idea where I'm going but I'm sure I'll know it when I get there.

It's time for some long-range shooting. Go, Silencer, go!

He ducks, he rolls, he shoots! He does one and only one action at a time because that's all his intricate pre-rendered frames allow!

I'm spotting a problem with the combat in this game. I can barely see a damned thing. The barrels are blending into the floor, my red targeting reticle is almost invisible. I can't see who's shooting me, if they're hitting me or not, or whether I'm hitting them. Even MegaTraveller 2 has bullet trail lines so you can see who is shooting who.

I think I'm playing the game right - ducking, diving, hiding behind cover as much as possible, but what's the point of being able to change posture if both sides can shoot through waist-high cover just fine?

SOME SEARCHING LATER

I ran a few laps of the facility trying to figure out where I should go next. There's no signs or markers or anything. All I can see around me are grainy, brown shapes. Eventually I managed to activate this keypad on the wall I'm facing, which I'm considering an achievement. I first assumed it was an intercom or something and dismissed it. It's teeny-tiny and difficult to see, and it's very hard to get the Silencer to stop walking in the right place to turn it on. On top of that, the keypad quietly refuses to work when an alarm is active which made me think it was just a prop.

The red rectangular panels on the walls are alert indicators, but they're also alarm disable switches. It's a good job they're frequent because most gadgets in the world don't work while the alarm is on, and the alarm is on almost all of the time, which also means infinitely respawning men from just off-screen and I'm pretty sure anyone you don't immediately kill runs straight to the nearest alarm and turns it back on again.

Crusader: No Remorse README.TXT - GamePad photo by Tosiabunio (license: CC BY 3.0)

Here's Crusader's readme, and its helpful ASCII diagram of the iconic Gravis PC GamePad. The standard IBM PC interface supports four buttons, so the Gravis puts them all on the right like a SNES pad. (There are no shoulder buttons.)

To walk in Crusader, use the D-pad. To shoot, it's the yellow button. To run, jump, or combat waddle you have to hold one of three modifier buttons while you move. Good start.

To search boxes, toggle weapons or use consumables, you somehow have to press combinations of these recessed buttons simultaneously. To use a health kit, you have to hold the red, blue and green buttons together with a direction! Your best bet is probably tucking your right thumb under the notch where the pad bulges and pressing the buttons with your fingertips. You could also put the pad down on a table, screw in the optional mini-joystick and play it like a miniaturised arcade panel, I guess.

It took me a while to figure out that the 'utsj dkgniid' text was an anagram of 'just kidding'. It's a joke, see!

It's around this point I realised I'd been walking past dozens of little green footlockers and boxes and things without knowing I could search any of them. Fallen enemies have tons of space-future Credits and ammo on them as well. To search bodies or use switches, you've got to tap both Blue and Green at once to bring up a cursor in front of the Silencer, and then press Yellow to activate the item. It's difficult; there's a real knack to it. I wouldn't recommend trying Crusader using a gamepad, if for no other reason than when you manage to pull off the button combination properly to activate a combination lock wall keypad, the gamepad has no way to enter a code!

The alarm sounds are the same as those in Deus Ex - which makes me realise that a lot of this game feels like Deus Ex - items, alarms, keycodes, computers with humourous messages on them, turrets, security systems. No alert music though... the game sounds like it has alert music on all the time, which doesn't fit with my helpless lost duck wandering. Now where could this code be? I haven't met the informant I'm supposed to be meeting yet, so maybe he gives me the code. I'm going to backtrack and look around a bit.

This room makes no sense. There's a gizmo in the centre that fires out grenades like a lawn sprinkler, and there's two engineers here as well whose job it is to... watch it up close? It didn't work out well for them.

I'm on my way to pull the chunky switch on the wall on the right, and unless you're sitting with your nose right up against the monitor I bet you can't see the shotgun and the ammo on the table beside it. The switch let me into a storeroom with some more ammo, but it also turned out to be a dead end. I'm stuck.

I feel like I haven't yet grasped the knack of Crusader's gameplay, and I'm getting annoyed at myself.

Take a look at this scene. The room looks set up as if there's some really clever action-packed stunt I ought to be able to pull off, but I can't figure it out. Doing a commando roll under the laser beams might work (though I doubt it), but if I roll over there it'll just leave me surrounded. All I can do is stride over to the switch on the left (because running would just send me into the lasers), then clumsily backstep a few times, swivel on the spot and hold down Fire until the enemies are all dead.

The Silencer commandeers a shooty walker and teaches the Consortium a harsh lesson about locking unattended computers. In the future of the 90s, PCs may have flatscreen displays but they'll still be beige!

Now what the heck do I press to detach myself from the bloody thing?

Landmines! Watch out, Silencer!

... I didn't see them the first time and blew up. This is why the manual and player's guide both recommend using the quick saves.

The refinery looks like it sprawls in every direction, but the route accessible to the Silencer is linear.

I had to pause here for a second to figure out how to get past the flame jet. In the end, I just walked through it. What's the point of wearing armour if it doesn't protect you, right?

Ugh. I'm getting shot from every direction here. There's a turret behind that explosion, and guys walking in from the right side. I could really use a pain indicator or stylish bullet trails or something.

Everything's so gloomy and grainy and blending into one scratchy mess. That object directly under the Silencer's crosshair is one of the openable footlockers I've been accidentally walking past since the start of the game because it looks like every other damned thing here.

I'd stop playing if it weren't for the music, doing its best to make all this seem like the most action-packed sci-fi raid you'll ever see.

A maze of randomly occuring paralysing arcs of lightning! Also a half-hidden robot shooting at me. Just what I wanted.

I've set off another security alert and it's locked the door. Dammit.

I know! I'll use these precise shooting controls to release the rolling barrel and crush the incoming spider-bomb!

Whatever, I survived it. That really was a lot of explosion for such a small spider.

It's not fair to Crusader: No Remorse, but the novelty of finding funny messages on computers or discovering keycodes and matching them to the doors they go with has worn very thin in the twenty-seven years since this game came out. Now all it means to me is having to exhaustively search every computer or computer-like object in case they hold a code I need to advance, and then lots and lots of backtracking to find where the code goes. On the PS1 version the codes are random too, so there's no cheating.

Stalemate. I need to head to the north-west, but there's a festive forcefield and a guard blocking my path.

I think Crusader wants to be a super-intricate dynamic world full of interactible objects that you can use together in crafty ways to outwit or evade your opponents. In this gif, I've fiddled with the handle to my left to vent poison gas right into the face of the poor unsuspecting guard! How mean!!

The problem here is that I can't see what bloody objects are scenery and which aren't, and when I've found something, it's difficult to tell what that something even is. It might seem a weird, artificial and possibly distracting mechanic, but the way that both System Shock 2 and Deus Ex constantly point out objects in the world and tell you what you're looking at is a gigantic plus over Crusader.

Also, Crusader has too many buttons. They're all over the place! There's at least five different ways to move the Silencer and none of them feel good. The way there are different postures and movement speeds and multiple ways to activate items reminds me of Conrad's lumpy movement in Flashback. And I'll be honest here, as a kid I never knew what the heck I was doing in Flashback. It was only as an adult many many years later that I got to grips with the annoying way the game had two distinct 'use' keys that both made Conrad face the background for a moment but had different effects.

I'm never going to remember all of this, Crusader, come on. And none of this is reconfigurable, by the way.

Crusader's camera jolts into position when you reach the edge, like in the Little Big Adventure series, so feel free to watch this animation on an endless loop if you want to authentically enjoy an endless parade of the Silencer's signature brand of graceless, disinterested action.

I've given up trying to avoid security alerts. There's just too many things I can't see that set them off. During an alert, enemies occasionally magically appear from just off screen, usually from dead ends and rooms where they couldn't possibly have come from. Which is a hoot. Apart from that, I barely notice an alert is active if I keep moving, except when I have to open a keypad door and it refuses to let me through and have to backtrack to an alert panel to turn off the alert and somehow get back to the door without setting off another alert. Agh.

Man down!

I was mid-mosey, committed to my stride when a fiendish foe threw a grenade in my direction. Unable to cancel the walk, I tried to weather the blast but didn't I count on it knocking out a few of the floor tiles and making me plunge to my immediate death.

Game over. There's no lives or checkpoints or game over screen in Crusader, the game just lingers here until you load a save. Good tip: save often.

I got bored of repeating the bridge scene and decided that I'd have more luck if I just ran past all the men and saw what happened.

I ran so far and so fast that enemies stopped being able to notice me since I was out of their field of vision before they turned toward where I was coming from. The game even let me run right through a laser barrier with minor damage that I'm sure in any other game would've been impassable or instant death. For my pièce de résistance, I managed to walk right past this guy and into the health recharging machine like a master criminal.

Oh yeah, I have a health bar! It's down there at the bottom of the screen, dark blue against dark grey; totally within your focus when you're in combat.

I found the informant guy! Against all odds, somehow, unbelievably, the complete dogmess I've made of the mission up to this point turned out to be what I was supposed to be doing.

He pops up in an FMV window, gives me a keycard, does a bit of fun 'You've gotta leave me out of this!' scaredy acting, then wanders off and disappears before more guards come.

These teleporters are everywhere in the base, just like Little Big Adventure (again). When the alarms are active, standard guards plop out of them every minute or so. With the informant's keycard, this one now works for me. I wandered backwards onto the pad on the other end trying to avoid something and accidentally telefragged this guy coming back, which gave me a chuckle after all the trouble the teleporters had caused for me so far.

I've forgotten what the objective is. Is it these computer things? I don't know what they are but I might as well blow them up anyway.

I'm trying out my spider bombs, they're just like the ones that come out of the floor except hopefully these ones don't blow me up. Oh yeah, I might not have mentioned it, but I've got a whole bunch of weapons and weapon slots and gadgets and things like that! I just don't use them because the interface is ghastly. I have no idea what items I have or what they do, and getting the Silencer to stand in the correct place facing the correct direction to deploy something takes ages and you can't move while doing it.

There's a bunch of security cameras you can activate, but like most videogame security cameras they're more gimmicks than useful tools since you have no idea where the room you're peering into is in relation to where you are, and by the time you get there you've usually forgotten what the room looked like anyway. This one's given me control of a chunky chunky megaturret, but that blasted guard has cannily chosen to stand in a place where the turret's prerendered frames don't allow me to shoot him!

If you're not rotating on the spot shooting identical men in Crusader, then you're solving one of its... ugh... puzzles.

I entered this room from the lower right, and all I have to do is exit in the upper left. Somewhere in this room is a trigger that activates a barrier across the exit and electrified tiles on the floor. It might be a timer, it might be an invisible beam, it might be a floor tile. Sometimes it's a camera, sometimes it's a robot, sometimes the thing you have to destroy is concealed behind the wall closest to the camera.

I thought this puzzle was timed at first, which is a real hoot with these controls. After that didn't work, I thought to avoid where the tiles would appear by jumping over them one at a time. Then I tried inching across the upper wall to skirt the tiles entirely. Eventually I got through by doing a running jump through the barrier.

Okay, that giant thingamabob has to be it. I've blown up everything else I can see.

Incoming transmission!

Alright! We did it! The thermal coupler's thermal coupling days are over, and 'The Wizard' here has powered up a teleporter on this floor for me to boogie on out of here. He says I've got a limited time to get there, but there's no time limit on-screen, but I suppose I ought to run anyway. It turned out to be just a few screens North of here.

We cut to a rendered cutscene outside the refinery, showing everything getting mighty thermal indeed.

Hurrah for the Resistance!

The Resistance has invited the Silencer home for breakfast...

"I'm Colonel Ely, and this is my base."

But that doesn't mean they're all going to be happy about it!

This guy's in charge and he's miffed that I'm going to hanging out with his cool crew. This scene goes on for a little bit, and introduces a little more of the state of the world under the Consortium to the player, which is neat. He's forgotten to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing next, though...

So I'm free to explore the rebel base! I'm guessing I either need to find the Silencer's bunk and sleep, and/or find Ely again to get the next mission started.

Click to enlarge

The rebel base is huge! I had to composite this map myself - the game doesn't give you a map here, or in the missions. Heaven help you if you get turned around.

Let's try to talk to somebody. How about that guy on the left in the purple vest?

Whoa! More FMV stuff!

This guy is 'The Weasel', and he supplies all the smuggled weapons for the rebels. He also seems to have a for realsies actual weasel on his shoulder. Or is it a ferret? How much must that have cost Origin to get in? Maybe it's the actor's pet?

I had no idea that there was going to be a between-missions shop where you could buy stuff. Good thing I blasted all those unarmed engineers standing around and nicked their dough. The game picked a really strange time to try and grow some new mechanics.

There's a couple of pistols, a shotgun, a chunkier pistol and some tools. I've got no clue which gun is better than which, or if I can even carry any more weapons at once. Suffice to say, this is another crappy menu in a game full of terrible interface designs.

"Let's not waste each other's time, Captain. If you're not seriously shopping, move on, huh? There are other customers waiting. There. There. There."

They recorded special 'Get out!' dialogue if you don't buy anything! I love it! Why did they hide all of this behind such a damned terrible first level?

There's so many FMV guys here! That's awesome!

Too bad this guy hates my guts. I got the hint when he ended the conversation with "You bleed just like all the rest. I should know, I've killed enough of your kind to find out."

Sure just a couple of days ago me and my identically dressed chums would have painted this whole place red and given each other high fives afterwards, but there must be somebody here who's happy to see me?

Well, okay. Can't say fairer than that.

The only guy here who is happy to see me is 'Tax Man', another Consortium defector. He got the name since it was him and his goons who'd be kicking down doors and taking over anything of value the proletariat managed to build. So that's nice. I'm sure everybody loves him, and will love me too for hanging out with him.

Why am I still wearing my Silencer armour??

There's nothing else to do here, so let's find Ely and see if there anything that needs shooting.

PlayStation game over screen

Change of plans. The second level looked exactly like the first level and, honestly, I could not be doing with it. I really have had it.

CONCLUSION
I have a confession. This post was supposed to be a simple dash through a few levels so I could write about the game quickly, but it definitely didn't turn out like that. Some articles like Menos: Psi-Shatter fly out of my brain and into the keyboard like magic, but the earliest screenshots I took for this Crusader post are dated January 2021, which can't possibly be right. That means I've been putting off thinking about the game for at least a year.

I simply can't think of anything nice to say about Crusader. I can't bear to look at it and it plays like hell. There's no way to jump into Crusader and have fun. The game fights every attempt to enjoy it.

I could repeat a lot about what I said about Fade to Black here - they're both ambitious games trying similar things, with similar controls, and similar results, except Crusader has barely any of the charm. Fade to Black had the bonus of continuing the story of a character I enjoyed, and kept up the lighthearted, sci-fi movie/comic/cartoon mood of its predecessor. Crusader can't match it. There's just not enough reason to keep playing. The controls are a horrible fusion of survival horror tank controls and cinematic platformer lumpiness. The game lets you change to directional control instead of tank controls, but it's still hugely difficult to move with any finesse no matter what you do. The bar of player investment required before Crusader starts to fit together nicely is way too high - it's designed for a better caliber of player than me.

A good comparison would be the original Grand Theft Auto. Once upon a time, young me could get his head around GTA's twirly controls and overhead view, but now if I try it I'm sure I'll be driving into walls and failing jumps and spraying bullets in every direction except where I meant to. I'd get absolutely nowhere but at least interesting things would happen. Bold, colourful, loud, bizarre and funny things. Failure would be fun - fun to play and fun to watch. Meanwhile, the Silencer is frequently defeated by keypad doors that refuse to work during alerts.

This game really has a terrible interface. And by that I mean the stuff that's on the screen. In other words, everything on the screen in this game is bad. The graphics are really noisy with a muted palette. They look good, but they don't look great. It's really hard to tell what or where anything is. I don't own a CRT PC monitor any more, but (being generous) I hope perhaps maybe the game looks nicer on its intended display. The HUD at the bottom is atrocious. Even Metal Gear 2 - the 2D one on the MSX - gives you captions and advice on what your items do.

The rest of Crusader's many problems come from it being an isometric action game. The genre was huge in the 80s, and tried to sneak its way into the 90s in the shape of games like Cadaver and Landstalker, but those games made the critical error of being terrible. The latter made me pine for The Speris Legacy, of all things!

Do you remember when games magazines in the early nineties would give games scores on 'Graphics' and 'Sound' and so on? One category they always included was 'Playability': a mystical tangle of the game's mechanical qualities, responsiveness and general je ne sais quoi. Crusader: No Remorse gets a perfect, round zero for Playability from me. It is not playable.

It's not as if isometric gaming was uniformly terrible. The Strike series would become kings of isometric action until third person vehicular games could become true 3D. Isometric gaming became the home of management games like Theme Hospital, Sim City 2000 and Transport Tycoon when they took their respective series' gaudy 2D worlds and turned them into beautiful, high-resolution professional toys. And there was much rejoicing. Though I firmly maintain that Command & Conquer lost all of its charm when it became isometric; I was never a big Age of Empires fan, and I never really understood Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

I'm racking my brain to think of any other isometric action games where you control the character directly. And that means Diablo doesn't count. It's like there's a twenty year void between Firo & Klawd in 1996 and Brigador in 2015 where the style vanished completely, or at least became a cute workaround for handheld games that wanted to be 3D but couldn't cut it, like Max Payne GBA. Was it Sonic 3D that killed the genre, or was it Whizz? People swear by Bastion, Transistor and Hades - but what came before those?

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, Crusader. Look, Crusader sucks.

The only redeeming qualities Crusader has are the FMV sequences and the soundtrack, and both of these are frustrated by being stuck inside Crusader the game. The FMV sequences would be meaningless to watch on their own, of course. Now that I know that all the NPCs have FMV dialogue clips, I kind of wish that the intro with the dudes in armour was live action as well.

Crusader's soundtrack might be lovely, but its sound driver code is awful. Regardless of what sound card hardware you possess or emulate, the game's music playback will suffer from some combination of crunchy low bit-depth, mono output, missing effects like pitch slides or be missing some instruments entirely. The game advertises support for the Gravis Ultrasound, but it cheats: it does its sound mixing in software like Sound Blaster games do. It doesn't use the GUS' hardware like Jazz Jackrabbit or Interpose, so Crusader uses up tons of CPU and sounds worse despite the vastly more expensive hardware, which is kinda tragic. There's no combination of sound card and drivers and patches that can make Crusader sound right, except for listening to the music outside of the game entirely on a different music player, which leaves no reason that I can see to play the game.

How other people manage to enjoy Crusader, I do not know. It even got a sequel: the heinously named Crusader: No Regret, ensuring future generations would never be able to tell the two games apart, which is just as well really since the games are identical. The first Crusader is on the PS1 as well, in slightly more chunky-looking graphics. The music randomly changes track when you pause for absolutely no reason, and the controls are direct instead of tank controls, but it seems to be all there. If you really wanted to play a more blobby version of Crusader on your TV, you can. That's probably the nicest thing I can say about Crusaders No Remorse and No Regret. If you're into it, there's a lot of it.

Oh yeah, I can also recommend reading Origin's Official Guide To Crusader: No Remorse (external link). It's gigantic at 191 pages and has some behind the scenes interviews and lots of useful and interesting info that accidentally makes the game seem pretty cool. So I can end this post on a high note after all, hooray!


Thanks for reading! If you've got anything you want to say about Crusader: No Remorse you're welcome to leave a comment in the box below. You could also take a guess at what the next game will be.

24 comments:

  1. Is another cat game next? Looks like Wing Commander III!

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    1. (to be fair, mecha-neko kind of spoiled it in the first line, but I somehow hadn't noticed that before commenting ^^ )

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    2. Yeah, it's Wing Commander III. Cat games just keep following mecha-neko around.

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  2. piece de *resistance*, eh?

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  3. Since Mecha-Neko gave the Next Game away, I'm going to pretend it's anything other than Wing Command3r and instead guess it's G-Police.

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    1. I did not, I swear! I (re)wrote this at the same time as Ray was playing WC II and it was my understanding that this was going to be published right after WC II as an Origin Systems double feature. Where Alien Storm came from in between, I dunno. And I didn't know what would be next either.

      On my posts I don't pick the Next Games or write the text above the banner at the start or below the horizontal line at the end. Ray's the one who gave it away! If it indeed -is- Wing 3ommander...

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    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    3. Too late, M-N! You've ruined the Next Game Game for everyone! We have no lost trust in our elected bloggers, and no one will ever visit this site again now, so all that work Ray has done on his W3ng C3mm3nd3r post will go unseen. For shame, Mecha-Neko, for shame.

      Anyway, the next game is G-Police, as I have stated. So there.

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    4. Oh for crying out loud. I'm not deleting and reposting again. The typo will stay and my joke will be ruined. So be it.

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  4. I loved Crusader when I was a kid and everybody I knew did as well, including all the gaming mags; sure it had its problems but the music, graphics and the atmosphere more than made up for all that.
    Replayed it recently and the technical side didn't age that well but it was still fun.

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    1. Oh same - I know someone who totally dug Crusader and owned it and played it loads until they moved to a Windows XP computer that wouldn't let them play it any more. I think they just thought was really really cool for all the reasons you listed. And it is! I just don't like it though.

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  5. That installation music is almost a bit Donkey Kong Country, at least until it goes all Mark Knopfler. I like it!

    The menu music doesn't sound at all like the Pinball Fantasies intro, but it does remind me a bit of it. Anyway, also good.

    (And what an epic track that was, for... a pinball game?)

    Yes, that is basically the New World Computing logo. I wonder if that's a deliberate dig? NWC and Origin were producing rival fantasy rpg franchises at the time so I could imagine there being a bit of banter going on.

    Alas, resistnet.osi.com does not exist. Sad face.

    The wonky controls and obscure graphic design are bizarre, because it's not like there's anything particularly new here. The perspective has been knocking around since the Spectrum days and the basic gameplay is a combination of Impossible Mission and a million run-and-gun games. But the combination seems to have caused a complete developer existential crisis for some reason.

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  6. Good axonometric/isometric games:
    Pretty much anything in the Spectrum-era boom for such games, in particular the Rare/Ultimate games, although Batman and Head Over Heels are both great, and I have a soft spot for The Great Escape, Where Time Stood Still, and Nosferatu the Vampyre, even if they are not exactly, literally, "good" as such.

    Arnie was pretty decent, if unambitious, on the C64. The Baldur's Gate games on the PS2 were not bad either.

    I'm told that the Lara Croft games in that perspective are pretty good, but I have no direct experience of them.

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  7. One 90s isometric game that I really enjoyed was Sanitarium. Was that direct-control, or pseudo-point-and-click, I can't remember. I only played it in 2021, after reading Ray's post on it. In my opinion it has that janky charm that you're looking for when playing old games of that type, while also being just bearable enough from a "playability" perspective. I finished the whole thing, which is a rarity these days.

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    1. That's awesome! I'm glad the game worked out for you.

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  8. The one thing I remember about Crusader - apart from the name, the box art, the general concept etc - is that it supposedly takes place in the same universe as System Shock. A poster that came with the game had some blurb about SHODAN, which was apparently in development at the time the Crusader games were set (except that the timeline was messed up, because in the finished product the Crusader games take place about a century after System Shock).

    For this reason reading about isometric games prompted my brain to dredge up D/Generation for the first time in what must be something like thirty years. It looked more cartoony but the graphics were much clearer and it was more fun to play.

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    1. I've been meaning to get around to D/Generation for the longest time. It was released on the PS3 I -think-, but inexplicably only in the US despite it being a Welsh game (if my very very foggy memory serves?) and recently it was re-released as 'D/Generation HD' on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. The only reason I haven't is that it's a little gloomy and samey and hard to tell what's going on from still images.

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  9. ahh this is a review I don't agree with.

    Crusader series is among my favorites games. Not only the music is superb, the art style, the action, the cheesy FMVs, it's great.

    You know the alarm is on, because you hear it all the time ! There's a constant voiceover saying "Intruder found .." or something. You have to be alert, and most items are well known after playing through it. I mean, I beat this game for the first time when I was 10. Blue chests can be opened, Cameras are always those domes in walls, and can also be in corners. That invisible sensor that you constantly managed to hit, it's visible ! It's a piny tixel in that poster wall, in the head you can see a red light that's animated. You have to shoot it to destroy the sensor.

    That "maze" room with lightning ? Actually you shoot those big columns and destroy them, that way you can cross them without harm.

    Also level 2 doesn't look anything like level 1, 2 is an office, with chairs tables, it's a completely different environment. They had a couple of other scenarios apart from the Factory setting from level 1.

    No regret is a better game in the end, but much harder. Anyway, it was a fun read

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    1. Thanks for reading. :D

      I might have turned the music volume up and that's why I couldn't hear the alarm? :) I'm glad you had a good experience with Crusader, but I think I would have to watch someone sitting next to me playing it before I could understand how to play it well.

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    2. I agree with Alex. The game was great in large parts because i allowed a great deal of interactivity with the environment for the time. As for your trouble understanding mechanics or items in the game, remember that this is a 90s game. It came with a manual (which you download as pdf these days) and the devs assume you read it. The manual explaines all the items and game mechanics. his review reads like you just jumped in and expected everything to just fall into place for you like is often the case in games nowadays. Well, this ain't it but it was perfectly normal for the time.

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  10. "Doing a commando roll under the laser beams might work (though I doubt it), but if I roll over there it'll just leave me surrounded." It does work actually. Roll behind the crates, then roll to the sides to pop the soldiers. The game is clunky but rolling and rapid-turning are the best way to navigate most areas.

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  11. Nice read, but I am at mission 8 and I still like the game. The only thing I needed to learn was the search button, item and weapon related buttons and the roll buttons. The game manual, that I guess no one has a chance to read these days, says the game praises observation. I've never had a single issue with the keypads. Do the controls seem clunky? Absolutely. So much in Dark Souls, yet it's still fun once you master them. The music being stuck in action mode? Dude, it's an action game from mid 90s, what do you expect?

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  12. Overall, it seems like a case of consolitis-infected player givig a shot at 90s DOS games

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  13. A bit late to the game, but Diablo IV and Hades are both isometric real-time action games that came out recently. I like neither of those games.

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