*definitely not the James Bond theme* *definitely not Goldfinger's theme
by Shirley Bassey* *TV buzzing* [CIVVIE]
Okay, alternate titles for this video: Stuck in the Middle with Doom, What the frack is a Blake Stone?, you know because YouTube wouldn't like it
if I dropped an F-bomb right in the title, the cowards! Oh, yeah, also
Will Rock in Space Calamity, John Earth: Galactic Spy, and the Adventures of Chad Feldspar. Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold
is a 1993 First Person Shooter based on the Wolfenstein 3D engine published by Apogee,
the height of gaming excitement. People don't remember it too well, but there's a super good
reason they don't remember it, let's cut right to the chase on this factoid : it came out a week before Doom. Doom killed it like Half-Life killed
everything that came out around Half-Life. Murdered it. Somehow it still got a sequel
but we'll talk about that a bit later. I don't wanna go off about this forever. Blake Stone was also released
the same day as Duke Nukem II, if your perception of time
wasn't screwed up enough. Apogee published Blake Stone but the game
was developed by JAM Productions, an outfit consisting of three gentlemen : Mike Maynard, Jim Rowe and Jerry Jones, with Bobby Prince making music because you couldn't throw
a rock in the early 90's DOS era without hitting Bobby Prince writing
a MIDI facsimile of a Slayer riff. Reportedly inspired to craft a game
about a secret agent IN SPACE, taking their cues from
obvious sources like James Bond, to the point that the main villain of
Aliens of Gold and its sequel Planet Strike is named Goldfire. And you could take Blake Stone
and put him in all kinds of adventures. Or not, you know, since the series
hasn't been heard from since 1994. Normally the story of a game would be
relegated to a page inside of a manual but to my genuine surprise, the Steam version that comes
in the Apogee Throwback Pack alongside Rise of the Triad has a Blake Stone comic book
included in the manual. [AX3]
"Agent Stone was the first
to hear the news from Selon. "It was odd that such a peaceful place
should suddenly become so violent." [CIVVIE]
You see, Blake Stone is from Old London, meaning he's a wuss who doesn't worry
about getting shot at the grocery store, bitch, coward, pussy no balls. So Blake Stone is
on the phone with his mother because he's a good boy
who calls his mother, or his mother calls him when she's worried
because she hasn't heard from his sister, Sara, who informs Blake in
what are likely her last breaths that Doctor Pyrus Goldfire,
a strange genetic engineer, has released a deadly experiment
into the colony to test its effectiveness, and that he plans
to invade Earth with mutants! With his A.I. companion R.E.B.A., Dick Marble goes to investigate, and here I thought he was sent
by Her Majesty's Secret Space Service. Thus begins an epic quest across two games
to bring Doctor Goldfire to justice… with violence! It's finally time to answer the question:
"What the fuck is a Blake Stone?" *Dark Hall by Bobby Prince* Yes, I'm using the BSTONE source port,
because, well, it's not DOS. According to my mission briefing,
Goldfire is aware of my arrival so from that we can extrapolate that
Jack Andesite is a terrible secret agent. We have to go deal
with Goldfire on the 9th floor. Did I say deal with him on the 9th floor? Because he teleports
in randomly to harass you. Because he's a dick. [Connery impersonation]
Ah, Goldfire! Fanshy a shpot of golf? Maybe a pan-galactic-gargle-blashter. [normal]
You shoot at him a little
and he teleports away… this time. And dozens of other times
during your playthrough. Blake Stone has 6 episodes,
like Wolfenstein, so you expect it to have 60 levels. You'd be right, except where Wolfenstein
had one secret level per episode, Blake Stone has two! So you've got 66 levels! *a long, defeated sigh* That's not to say that Blake Stone
is a bad game, far from it, I actually think it's a better game
than Wolfenstein 3D. It's packed with new features, you can even see some of them here : floor and ceiling textures! Enemy variety that goes beyond
"different colors of hit-scanners". Hell, within a minute you'll see
mutants with projectile attacks. They can't do anything to you because
projectiles can't go through these force-fields. Those force-fields,
usually, can be turned off! By switches. This came out a week before Doom! And aside from not having an advanced
engine that can do… uh… height, it has many other things. You are still running
around and grabbing keys, Blake Stone has
five different colored keys, but one of them is only for
unlocking new floors at the elevator. That's the one you'll get
towards the end of a stage and the elevator,
instead of only going one-way, lets you travel back and forth
between any floor in the building that you've unlocked at any time. You don't need to do this,
progression is still linear and there's no reason to go back
to a floor you've already cleared, but the option is there. As a professional spy-person, you'll also need to use more subtle
tools to complete your mission, like contacting informants in the field. Not all of Goldfire's scientists are on board
with the "invade Earth with mutants" plan. A shocking number of them are still on board
with the "invade Earth with mutants" plan. An NPC, a friendly character
that gives you information or some ammo or some food
tokens for the vending machines that can be essential
for getting some health back. Yeah, all of these interactive elements that wouldn't be a mainstay in
FPS games for at least another five years. I mean, yeah, it still has
a lot of stuff from Wolfenstein, like treasure and points, which you'll be filling up
mostly by finding secrets. And there are even more of those
than you'd see in Wolfenstein 3D. You can't throw a Blake Stone
without hitting a secret wall in Blake Stone and when you're inside of a secret,
keep up that wall-humping because there's probably
a secret inside of that secret. And that secret? There's also probably
a secret inside that one. THIS SECRET IS FIVE SECRETS DEEP. This game is hiding
more secrets than the CIA! Oh, and instead of Wolfenstein 3D, where you had no map and you were left
to wander around like an idiot, Blake Stone has an auto-map. Yeah. Before Doom! It even shows you keys and locked doors. It's great and I love it. And then you're also
collecting all of this treasure and these ugly AdLib sound effects that accompany these pickups
might make your ears bleed but for those of us who grew up with
our PC being more beloved than our NES, it's music to our ears. *ear-ripping AdLib sound effects* Also, like Wolfenstein, all your weapons use the same ammo type, with the exception of the
auto-charge pistol, your starting weapon, which is a silenced energy weapon that
hits about as hard as a strong raindrop, or whatever, sometimes it one-hits the basic guards because despite improving
on a lot of the Wolfenstein formula, they did not seem to do
much to the hit-scan code. So yeah, don't worry, there's
still really shitty hit-scan enemies. Like my nemesis, the STAR Trooper. Who doesn't just show up
in the STAR Institute, he hangs around for the rest
of this game and the next, and is responsible for
a significant number of my deaths. Imagine the SS Officer from Wolfenstein except once you shoot him,
he screams something in English… And then a random amount
of time passes and he gets back up. And you know how the hit-scan math
in the Wolfenstein engine is nonsense that I don't understand? Well, it still is, even in this game, and so a hit from this guy can either
be a flesh wound or a death sentence. Like right here? Mid-range hit and 50%
of my health disappears. Other enemies responsible for a good
chunk of my deaths, the electro-spheres. According to the informants,
"Electro-Spheres can be a nuisance!" Yeah, no shit… Let me put some context in here,
and do some math for you kids. Touching that enemy drains your health, and through the power
of having clips in a video editor, Katie was able to help me out on this. Take it away, Katie! *smooth jazz music*
*On the Rocks by TrackTribe* [FLEX TAPE MEME]
That's a lot of damage! *smooth jazz music*
*On the Rocks by TrackTribe* [CIVVIE]
Yeah, that's bullshit! If you think those are your only plasma-based
problems in this game, have I got news for you! Someone thought it would be
a good idea to make enemies that shoot the same kind of projectiles
those fake-dummy-Hitlers in Wolf3D did. Those killed you pretty quick
if you remember, so obviously you need to create
a machine that spawns them indefinitely. No, you know what,
I like this game, I really do, but this? Nah, this is too far! Drop a couple of these on Earth
and you don't even need all the mutants. Where was I? *Strut by Bobby Prince* Yeah, so most of your weapons
are also hit-scan attacks, and like in Wolfenstein, the biggest
difference between them is the rate of fire. Your auto-charge pistol sucks,
your regular pistol also sucks, then you've got your… Rapid Assault Weapon. [GORDON RAMSAY]
It's fucking raw! [CIVVIE]
You know what, I feel kinda
bad about how easy that was, can I get a jolt for that? [AX3]
You would like to volunteer
for an electric shock? [CIVVIE]
Yeah. Look sometimes
I need a little kick in the ass, you know, to keep the content fresh… [H4MM3R]
Boy, what kind of show
do you think you do? [CIVVIE]
I'm a video essayist. Not buying it, huh? [H4MM3R]
Shut up, content monkey. [CIVVIE]
You've also got your
Dual Neutron Disruptor, and this is where it dawned on me that Corridor 7
was trying to rip off Blake Stone the most and that Blake Stone
is Corridor 7 but good. The Rapid Assault Weapon
and the Dual Neutron Disruptor are basically the machine gun
and chaingun from Wolfenstein. But THEN, eventually, you get the big gun, and by eventually,
I mean in a secret in the first level. A Plasma Discharge Unit, a PDU,
but a BFG by any other name. Sort of like a rapid-fire grenade launcher, it's my go-to weapon
for the rest of the playthrough, as in 64 more levels. I missed one of the secret levels, I don't know where that is in episode 4… so you'll see a lot of it, is what I'm saying, and I have my reasons for doing this. Normally the biggest weapon
in your arsenal isn't practical because it eats through ammo
or has splash damage. Not this time. Yes, while other weapons
use one energy per shot, and the PDU uses 4, the other weapons are hit-scans
that have random damage potential. The hit-scan weapons, generally, generally, work better when
you're closer to the enemies, but you know what works even better? HOT FUCKING PLASMA. And they don't always hit their mark, and the projectiles seem
to be kind of jankily tied to some basic
approximation of gravity, like… It's not actually gravity, right, the sprite's frames are
animated to move down, they're not doing this because
of somebody programming another dimension onto this whole thing, it's a complete lie, and one of the frames is misaligned, and it's still your best option
in terms of weaponry. Right, stay with me,
I'm going… somewhere? … with this. The PDU uses 4 ammo per shot but it also produces a reliable amount
of damage that will one-hit most enemies. And whatever is next to them. And probably some informants. I kill a lot of informants
during this whole thing, which is their fault, for being stupid and hanging out where there's a madman
with an explosive plasma weapon running around. It can take more than 4 shots from
any other weapon to kill an enemy. So it's actually the
most ammo-efficient option. And the devs knew this, and
they did something about it later, but that's something we'll get to. The only drawback is that
the PDU can't kill every enemy. It's limited to all
but one, the ceiling turrets, because as we've established,
it is totally 100% affected by gravity. Wink wink. The ceiling turrets can't be killed with it
and also can't be killed with the pistol. They're "heavily armored" and can only
be killed with higher tier plasma weapons like the RAW and
the Dual Neutron Disruptor. All this adds up to an
enjoyable game, for the most part, with a lot of struggling and
game-loading based on some bullshit like two-thirds of your health disappearing
from one hit because a guard got lucky! However, any moderately skilled player will have all the weapons by
the end of level 2 of an episode, usually, and you'll also have met a majority of
the enemies in the first episode of the game, meaning that things
can get a little repetitive. See, before real 3D levels, things like Binary Space Partitioning, when the levels were
created in a tile editor, you could throw levels
together really quickly, so it makes sense that for these old games,
you'd really get bang for your buck. 66 levels! A lot of them are the same, which is why I'm not going into
a lot of detail about the levels themselves. There's cool stuff, don't get me wrong, and it goes a lot farther
than Wolfenstein 3D did when it comes to
making these places feel like, well, actual places and
not brick mazes full of nazis, with all the interactive stuff and the NPCs
and the little bits of environmental detail, and, oh, yeah, actual level names
that you can see at the top because this was before we could make the
heads-up-display not take up a third of the screen. The difficulty of the episodes
zig-zags from being easy at the start and I think the hardest it gets
is around the beginning of Episode 4, which gives you a
Plasma Fucker-Upper at the start, not even in a secret, which is a bad omen. Jesus, I'm just trying
to wall-hump here, gimme a break! Episode 3 starts you
off with your shitty pistols and then the ceiling turrets
you can't destroy with the pistol, have fun with that shit. Yeah, we're not asking
what that pink meat is. It gives us health,
I don't wanna know where it came from, especially since none
of the enemies are that color. One drawback of the Big Plasma Boner is that if there's a thing
that can open or blow up near it, that thing will blow up, and there's a few enemies in this game that can be released from
cages or tanks when that happens, like this xenomorph. Then you've got one of these
high security genetic guards, right, and- FUCK! How long was that, Katie? Awesome. That was from full health. Isn't that fun? Secrets in this game
don't play around either because they've usually
got enemies inside them too, meaning you have to find them
if you want 100% completion, which I don't, don't even ask, I didn't do 100% completion, and I still got 14 hours of Blake Stone
footage to go through here. Here's something that
blew me away : this informant. This isn't something that
happened ever again in this game. The informant told me that "Hidden
arenas can be accessed from this room". This completely nondescript hallway. And he was right! Here's a secret. I wouldn't call this an arena though,
maybe that's a typo. But there's another secret wall in this room
that does have one enemy behind it, one of these exploding drones, so I guess maybe
technically that's an arena. So this is all well and good, but gameplay is pretty much
the same throughout each floor. Until… *Jungle by Bobby Prince* Each episode starts with you
and your wimpy silent pistol and ends with you armed to the teeth ready to fight a mutant boss
on the ninth floor. But first, Goldfire pays you a visit. [Connery impersonation]
Goldfire, old chap! Sharp suit you're wearing,
plasma-resistant, I see. [normal]
Yeah, he shows up in each boss level
and you have to defeat him so that he'll drop a key and teleport away so you can kill the real boss of the episode, like this guy here, the spider mutant. Or this guy, the Acid Dragon… Or this one, the Breather Beast… Or the Cyborg Warrior… Or the Bio-Mech Guardian… Okay, I suppose
I can try a different strategy. Just kidding! Or the final boss of the game, which is not Goldfire,
but instead the Reptilian Warrior! You do not kill Goldfire
at the end of this game, which is kind of strange, right? Nope, he still drops a key, and at the end of each episode on Floor 9, you can usually find another red key
in a secret that will unlock Floor 10, the second secret level of the episode, a totally optional thing
you do after the boss is dead. And sometimes the red key
isn't even in a secret. And one time there's a secret exit
inside the secret level to take you from Secret Floor 2
to Secret Floor 1, and all you're really doing
is grabbing treasure. So… much… treasure… *the return of the
ear-ripping AdLib sound effects* Secret levels are usually a little more
stuffed with treasure and monsters, and maybe you're playing Episode 6, and you find one of those secret teleporters
that take you to the episode's first secret level, this one being Goldfire's Money Vault! *The Price is Right title theme* Hell yeah, try funding a mutant invasion
after I take all your gold, bitch! I hope Blake doesn't have to like turn this money
into the British government at the end of this. After each episode, you'll see the cutest
attempt at a short cutscene, I love these. They actually do look
super good for the time. After the final boss is dead, you have to destroy a bunch
of Projection Generators, which were gonna be used
to transport the mutants to Earth. Let me just go through here and- Oh, I ran out of ammo… *Super Mario Bros. 3
Sky Land Theme* Okay. We're done. *evil laugh in the distance* Man, Apogee back in the day
had the best presentation. Absolute kings. So that was Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, a pretty enjoyable romp, and probably would have been remembered
better for pushing technology forward a bit, you know, if Doom hadn't
come out a week later. According to an interview
with Mike Maynard, Apogee wanted the game
to have a bit more work and polish so it was delayed and, well,
you see where that went. I wanna add that it seems like
there is no bad blood here, and that Apogee treated JAM Productions
well by all accounts I could find. I'd give it a solid 8/10. It's good, I like it, though you shouldn't play it all at once. I did an episode per day and I still
got kind of bored towards the end because like Wolf3D, it's a mile wide, but not quite an inch deep. Wolf3D was an inch deep, I'd give Blake Stone about
six inches by comparison. I can't decide if it's lazier to write a dick joke
here or to not write a dick joke here. [H4MM3R]
Hey, everybody,
look at the video essayist over here. [CIVVIE]
Yeah… So then in 1994, they made
Blake Stone: Planet Strike… *Monastery by Bobby Prince* You know, kinda like Spear of Destiny, it's shorter, like a third of the length, there's 24 levels in Planet Strike, and I can say that I played 21 of them. I missed the secret ones. It is, however,
not quite like Spear of Destiny. It's not just new levels, it's new everything! Better graphics! Look at those redrawn weapon sprites! No, wait, that is definitely the hand
sprite from Rise of the Triad. Better effects! The levels can now
have different lighting! Woooowwww! Higher resolution sprites for enemies! Because they use boss enemy sprites
from Aliens of Gold for common enemies. What? A new weapon, the Anti-Plasma Cannon! No full-view auto-map… Wait, WHAT THE FUCK?! Some of these changes
are not for the better. Like cloaked guards. Oh, sorry, informant dude, don't walk behind cloaked guards, it's not like you can't see them, all right? He's clearly there. All the enemies are basically
the same except re-skinned to be more alien. And re-named… Ah, yes, I too am a veteran of the Tek Wars. [WALTER BASCON]
The body count keeps rising
and it's harder and harder to justify it. We're not the killers, they are! [CIVVIE]
So Planet Strike is,
more or less, the same, with updated visuals and
slightly updated technology. So how could it be a worse game? Well… Let's get the easy part out of the way, the level design is weaker, I think, and towards the end of the game, it feels like they're trying
to get the thing out the door, like they know the Blake Stone
franchise doesn't have much of a future, which is a depressing thing. The last few levels before
the final boss are tiny, almost perfunctory compared
to the more sprawling and interesting ones that came before. And I would show you an overhead view
of the whole map like I did in the previous game… but I can't. Because you don't get one of those anymore. The whole "auto-map" thing
has been re-tooled and now sucks. You might see that you have
a mini-map on the HUD there, very cool, nice to have, but it's all you have for the map and you can't zoom out, so navigating these levels is more difficult
than it was in the previous game. You can zoom in, and there's this extra bar on the side, which is radar power, yeah, power for the radar on your map because you can zoom in all the way
and it will show you where secret walls are. Cool, right? Yeah. Except while there were
a million secrets in the previous game, there's like a quarter as many here so they've introduced
a mechanic that will help you find something in the first game
that was rewarding and made sure that you
not only find those things less, by a frustrating amount, but in order to find
those rewarding things less, you need to find new pickups to power
the radar that runs dry pretty quickly, to the point that you'll still be
wall-humping when that runs out and you'll still, overall,
be finding a lot less. You'll also see the levels
simplified somewhat and the number of keys reduced which would impact that amount
of time you spend looking for stuff except you crippled the fucking auto-map so it actually takes longer in most cases. And to exit a level,
you don't find a red key anymore. You have to pick up a bomb
and plant it at a security cube, blowing that up, and now you can head to the exit teleporter
and it gives you access to the next area. That's also not a bad idea, although it adds
an extra step to leaving the level okay, so three keys, plus one bomb, plus going to the security cube… that's five things still, right? I don't know, maybe I was just really
burned out on Blake Stone after playing over
60 levels of that last game and then going right into Planet Strike because it's different enough
to talk about in a video but not different enough
to warrant its own video no matter how hungry
the content vultures get. So that new weapon,
the anti-plasma cannon, is an explosive plasma
weapon like the PDU, except they don't pretend
it's affected by gravity, it eats up twice the ammo,
and does even more damage. And that's cool, no complaints. But there was that issue
I mentioned before where any smart player would use the
more ammo-efficient non-hit-scan weapons that one-hit most of the monsters. Well, the devs thought
of a way to discourage that. See, the deterrent they implemented to stop you
from using your most effective weapons was to make it so the ammo pickups
now explode if they're within range of it. You know, so now you waste
more ammo if you're not careful. I see, threatening to blow me up
if I don't play your way, well, guess what, JAM Productions,
that doesn't deter me, because I don't negotiate with terrorists! Sorry, informants,
game needed better balance! This whole thing feels a little rushed
and unceremonious, if I'm being honest. There are new bosses,
like The Giant Stalker, a recolor of a common
enemy from Aliens of Gold, so you're re-using boss
sprites as common enemies and common enemy sprites as bosses? Is that what I'm seeing? There's a boss every 5 levels
like in Spear of Destiny, and so the second one is actually
something that you guys haven't seen before. And you'll barely see it now. See? There are bosses
that aren't reused assets, like in Goldfire's lair, where you fight The Crawler Beast, a fearsome… giant rat? Yeah, that wasn't so hard. And thankfully this game gives us
some fucking closure too since you actually fight Goldfire. [Connery impersonation]
Yesh, Goldfire! Long pasht time we- [normal]
HOLY SHIT! Oh, so Goldfire has the most effective
attack in either of these games, just spamming energy at you
in a pattern that's hard to avoid. But I know his one weakness, the weakness of all FPS bosses
in these sophomore years of game design. Circle-strafing! You might say, "That's not fair, Civvie", because you couldn't really
circle-strafe in those days, in that engine, when you had one key
you held down as a strafe modifier. But I don't care. Goldfire is dead, and that's what matters. "Great work, Blake!
You've defeated Dr. Goldfire!" And avenged my sister, right?…
I avenged my sister, right? I think that might have
been a comic-only thing… *loud air conduct noise* NO! NOOOO! NOT AGAIN! Why can't you people
space out your releases? I guess June is gonna be
a month of new releases, god help me, since y'all wouldn't
shut the fuck up about Boltgun. Whatever that is, I'm not a 40K nerd, so I hope you enjoy that video… Suckers! *end credits*
Quality video. I played the shareware version of this way back in the day (christ I'm old), but as Civvie points out, Doom soon followed and overshadowed Blake Stone in every conceivable way. Still fun though for what it is!