You know what, it's been ages since we've done some DOS trash. From that special time between 1994 and 1997, Where everybody was trying to make a Doom clone but nobody wanted to license the engine. A magical time in interactive entertainment that brought us today's... ...game. It took me weeks to get through this goddamned game on the easiest skill, so y'all better sit back and take it, I don't care what you want. AXE: "Where's Pro Quake, Civvie?" HAMMER: "Where is Pro Amid Evil, CV-11?" AXE: "Where's the DNF video?" HAMMER: "Where is D. B. Cooper?" CIVVIE: What? AXE: Where's the stolen hydrogen bomb? CIVVIE: ...I didn't steal a HYDROGEN bomb. Of course we're using DOSBox again. Ahh, it's been so long. Like, since Christmas, I think. I mean, let's just start with the full motion video cutscenes. Cuz it has those. We just got a ton of them smackers up in this bitch. Somebody please help me, I have 90 fucking gigabytes of Island Peril footage on my computer. Atlantean Interactive Games presents, a dissolving rainbow. A game by Electric Fantasies. Aw, listen to that sax. This is going to be steamy, kids. Let's just put that age restriction up right now. *Steamy sax music* "*Sigh...*" "35 years." "The last night fighting crime... what have I got to show for it?" "Alimony and ulcers, and a house worth half my mortgage." "A caseload full of scum."
CIVVIE: What the fuck is this? "There's no glory in it. Putting pimps and drug dealers away, cleaning up this city's trash." "You get no thanks. Nobody cares." "I sit here in Pacoima, on my birthday, with nothing to look forward to." "I'm getting out of this racket." CIVVIE: But you worked 35 years, so you were a bad guy until nine years ago when you stopped? Maybe you met a nice girl and she's gone now? Do you have a dog? Are you John Wick? "Gonna go work for the bad guys for a change." "They always win in the end anyway, cuz they've got all the money." CIVVIE: This is the intro to a 90s FPS game. *Phone ring-a-lings* *Phone ring-a-ling-dings* "Dick Danger." CIVVIE: No, come on. That guy is Dick Danger? That guy is like Richard Sunday Drive. That guy's Ricky Tax Audit. "Dick Danger. Retired crime fighter." CIVVIE: He says crime fighter like this, but I think he means like this. *Completely unintelligible phone garble* DICK DANGER: "Who is this?" "Don't you recognize the voice of DOOM when you hear it?" CIVVIE: I'm just gonna throw it out there, Jim Sterling looks like shit with a moustache. "Actually, I have here with me, uh, a lovely young intern of yours," "uh, who you might remember. Say hello to old Dick." "Dick? You're my only hope. I'm so scared, please help me." DICK: "Sam? What's going on? Are you all right?" "I'm so touched by your concern, mister Ram-rod DA!" CIVVIE: Mystery solved, he was a district attorney. All the summaries of this game that I can find say he's a cop, but... Okay, Dick Danger is a lawyer. Dick Danger Esquire.
DA Dick Danger. Fucking California. So DA, banging his intern, paying alimony. He seems like a good dude who fights crime SAM THE INTERN: "Dick? You're my only hope. I'm so scared. Please, help me." CIVVIE: Well, nothing the district attorney in Los Angeles could do. He probably has no strings to pull on this one. He's only a lawyer, so he's got to head to the airport with a gun and sort this out. THE CRITIC: "Tonight, we review an aging Charles Bronson in Death Wish 9." DICK DANGER BRONSON: "I wish I was dead. Oy." CIVVIE: I'm not sure anything I've talked about has made any goddamn sense yet. And we're off. Let me start a new game here DOOM: "Hurry up and get this over with, I've got a hot date." "...Sam." "I've got a hot date... Sam." CIVVIE: Did he forget her name? He forgot her name. Yup, this is hideous. You guys are seeing this a little differently than I did. See, Katie's editing this to fit a modern aspect ratio, and the only reason she can do that is because this game usually looks like this, and this bar at the top is nothing and serves no purpose, so just cut it out. Okay controls are... standard I guess for the time, but I'm gonna need to change 'em. There's no dedicated strafe buttons, shit is not cool. I can jump and crouch and shoot. Let's check the map. Oh, God. This might be a DOSBox thing but... ugh. A secret wall. Hey, that's... magic noises, and I'm dead, got killed by bodybuilders SAM: "That evil boss of this outfit sure gives me the creeps." CIVVIE: It's gonna play one of those every time I die, isn't it? Okay. Well, let me just save my game and take this here game disc and smash it into a thousand pieces. Yeah, this is trash. I'm out. Evil Boss: Richard Head. Richard... Head. The girl is credited as Sam. I'm just gonna go on IMDb here. See what else she's been in. It's interesting, she's got two credits to her name. Island Peril, and a major role in a Wes Anderson movie nah, I'm kidding, It's softcore porn. "A modeling agency provides the perfect setting for many romantic skirmishes between a" B R O T H E R A N D S I S T E R "who share its inheritance. At first the two despise each other," "but it soon becomes apparent that the fine line between love and hate is about to be crossed." I was so worried this episode was going to be boring. Okay, I'm back. Let's rebind these... Ugghhhhhh. So I can't rebind the controls. I can use the mouse, but you're stuck with the arrow keys for movement and not WASD. Right control for shooting, left shift for jumping right alt for strafing, left ctrl to crouch and right shift for running. How about no? I got to rebind these with DOSBox, this is awful. Oh god damn it, it's one of those games. One of those "you could save your game at any time, but when you load it, it sends you back to the beginning of a level." I don't see this causing any problems. The movement in this game is atrocious. Some people have compared old FPS game movement to being on rollerskates, which I disagree with. Unless you're talking about this fucking game. Every time you move in any direction, you retain momentum for a little while. And you move slow, and the game wants you to dodge projectiles, except strafing is really slow. Unless you jump strafe run, which sends you fucking flying unpredictably, and stopping trying to get any degree of accuracy while moving and shooting is a serious problem. I can't use the mouse because if I want to dodge anything, I need both my hands on the keyboard. So here's the shotgun. Oh, hey, look at that. The gun is ugly, the hands are huge, and the muzzle flash is straight from Doom! Of course it is! A machine gun. Cool, with a muzzle flash... straight from Doom. Well, at least we know one talented artist worked on this game. His name is Adrian Carmack. I was just gonna talk about this stuff as it came up, but you know, here's just some of the stuff that was lifted from Doom. *Doom E1M7 - Demons On The Prey* *Yep, it's still going* For fuck's sake, at least Capstone traced over their Doom sprites. You're lazier than Capstone. SAM: "God, what did I get myself into?" I'm dead again, because when you send an enemy into their pain states ...What the fuck? Did they turn the fog red in the level for when you get damaged? Because that's not like a damage overlay. That's... I'm not... What the fuck? You might notice I'm picking up coins. That's for the shops that rise out of the ground like this here. *The sound it makes when a shop rises out of the ground* You can buy ammo in the shops. Not health though, or armor, and every time you buy something you watch a video of this woman. "Thank you for choosing Island Treats. Please make a selection." And you got to skip it every time so you get used to hammering the number key and the space bar if you don't want to waste your time. The shop doesn't show you the prices or how much money you currently have - why would you need any of that information? You're a smart guy, District Attorney Dick Danger. This woman here, she's got two credits to her name. One is Island Peril, the other is a softcore erotic thriller. I thought this was gonna be a Wolfenstein clone, it's not. So you can aim up and down. Man, it'd be funny if that didn't even remotely work. If you're wondering, this game came out in 1995. There's armor, too - it doesn't work like in Doom, right? It absorbs all damage up until it's depleted. You can pick up sunglasses for one point, helmets for 10, a flak jacket for 25 - Yeah, that's a flak jacket - an armored suit for a hundred, and a rain slicker for 200. A rain slicker for 200. A yellow raincoat provides eight times the protection of a flak jacket, and oh yeah, it never rains in this game. Health is similar - a health elixir gives you one point, medkits give you 25, a balanced meal gives you 50, and a barbell pumps you up to 200. Unless it's certain barbells you pick up, which are raincoats and give you 200 armor. This game has an enemy roster that really makes it shine, and most of them have little cutscenes to go with them. You got dweebs... DWEEB: "B-b-b-boss!" "We're trying to get him! It's not my fault he got away!" CIVVIE: I should mention that this is a video that plays after you die. DWEEB: "It's not my fault He got away!" CIVVIE: Dweebs are basically clueless and weak. They are always being ignored and laughed at... ...by WOMEN. They're the weakest, they go down with one shot and are barely a problem. Hint: They whimper nicely, don't they? Oh, no-n-n- ew. Bodybuilders have always had their way with women. A hex put on them by the witch doctor has made them repulsive They're pretty pissed about it and are more than willing to take it out on you... ...THE PLAYER. Yeah, these guys are absolutely disgusting to look at. BODYBUILDER: "Better watch out. I've got you in my sights." Underworld Devils can fuck right off. I just called them Mojo because... *Underworld Devils shouting Mojo a lot." That's their alert sound. They toss fireballs. Constantly. Say goodbye to at least a quarter of your health. And they're one of the few enemies that can't be stun locked into not attacking you on easy mode. Every time I hear "mojo" in this game. It's trouble. The fireballs they throw, they drop to the ground and travel towards you and you can strafe out of the way - very very slowly. They still just keep fucking going and shooting them, not giving you much time to aim at them again. I know it looks like I'm really bad at this game. I promise it's because the controls are garbage. UNDERWORLD DEVIL: *Casual racist underworld devil language* CIVVIE: Voodoo Gods fire a projectile at you that takes 75 points off your health or armor. VOODOO GOD: "Dum-Bala is riding me. Escape is impossible. You are mine!" CIVVIE: Voodoo gods are relentless and determined. Once they spot you, only fast thinking and fast movement will save you. Sounds like a death sentence to me. Hint: don't waste your time with mere bullets. That's a bullshit hint and I'm gonna tell you why: these fuckers phase in and out of existence, And shooting them with like six or seven rockets takes forever. Stun locking them with the machine gun takes about as much time, even if it wastes a shitload of ammo. So what I did is I use the shotgun Yeah, I have to hit them twelve or thirteen times in order to kill them, But if you keep them under fire, they never attack you. Flaming Tikis. They shoot the exact same fireballs the Underworld Devils fire, and you get a water gun that you can refill when you walk into water. That's a whole other can of worms. Let me just say that the water gun is only useful on these things. Witch doctors are floating heads, and the best demonstration of this game's art style when it's not digitizing actors or stealing from Doom. They take a million hits but I think they're the only enemy in this game with any kind of intelligent pattern. They start weaving around in a circle to avoid fire You're gonna be buying a lot of machine gun ammo in this game because it stun locks most everything, including these guys, who shoot rockets at you. I know they're not supposed to be rockets, but they're rockets. The way the enemies behave is simple - when you alert them either by sound or line-of-sight, they'll walk straight towards you. If there's a wall in the way, they'll hump that wall. If there's a bottomless pit that they'll fall into and die, they will drop right into that pit. And he can fucking fly! I'd say this was bad pathfinding, but that really stretches the definition of pathfinding. There's a prison level and when you open the cells, right, they'll hug the cell bars until you move towards the door. They're so dumb. You'll meet all these enemies within the first few levels. There are... 17 levels in this game. Took me a total of seven hours to finish it. Why? Well, Island Peril is a special kind of game. It's ugly as sin except for the Doom stuff. (Which they imported into a different color palette so it looks like shit.) So you know some of the weapons already. Pistol. Shotgun. Machine gun. After that you get a flamethrower that fires the same stuff Mojo hurls at you, and can be useful if you're higher up because aiming up and down is nearly impossible. You also have that water gun, the lube gun, which slows enemies down, but... why? They're already pretty slow, and I'm just gonna have to switch weapons to something that actually damages them. And there's the BFG of the game, the Mambo Grande, which translates to... ...Big Mambo... and fires the same projectiles as the Voodoo God does. They bounce, but I can't hit anything with them. Gameplay is getting keys and hitting switches - a lot of the time you won't know what a switch activates. It's usually a door that says "this door is locked". Not "you need a red key". There are actually four colored keys in this game, and you think they're gonna do the good and correct thing and have little textures to tell you which one you need for the door. Which they do! For like the first two levels, and then fuck you, you're on your own. I'm not gonna go through every single level to explain why they're all shit, because only most of them are shit. Here's a few highlights. One level has you picking up keys before you're even allowed to access the door that they open. You get a key... before you find the door that the key opens... meaning that locking the door is pointless, and also it's not marked. So since you already have the key, because when you pick it up it lowers this wall so you can get to the door that opens... Wait. No, stop. Hold on. You see this here, right? I just started the level and this guy exploded into gibs. And you might be walking around the levels thinking there's a lot of gibs all over the place on this island. I know why... now. Because I'm playing on a lower difficulty, and instead of doing a thing like any other game ever would do, where the extra enemies you'd see on a higher skill just don't spawn into the map, They do in this. They explode when the level starts. When the level starts, they explode. I thought you kids would love for me to do some trash again, and I picked this random old DOS shooter and this was it! This was it! SAM: "Dick? Oh, Dick. I hope you're cumming." "...to get me." When you're going through levels, you'll notice that this game has water. Now, that's not so interesting. Lots of games have water. You move really, really slowly in the water, also nothing special. But this game has to go above and beyond. Because when you're in water, you move slower, and when you're above water, you also move slower. Same thing with lava. So when this game wants you to platform over lava later, and you jump over it and suddenly come to a dead stop and take damage, that's why. To be fair, this game only crashed like half the time I played it. The pinnacle though - Level 11: Pratt Institute. This is the one where I nearly broke my keyboard. I took a nine day break from play in this game. And I stayed in the cold room. *Hope you're in the mood for more racism* *Subtitle for laughter* CIVVIE: Open all Ntght? So I played this level at least a dozen times, because dropping into this area with 10,000 enemies in it. "The power of evil is more than you'll dream of. I will snap you... like that." You need time and cover to do this, and you don't have that unless you go past the water, on the water, which slows you down, in the air, and this place killed me quite a few times and then this one, and then this one, I restarted this level over and over and over, not because of the death pits. There's not a lot to this game. It's just that what little there is is so badly implemented and messy that I just want to finish this level. I'm almost - F U C K ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! I finished this game though. Oh, I finished it. The final level takes place at a military base. Giant open areas full of monsters are your worst nightmare. You have to prioritize hit scanners, but Mojo over here is everywhere too - and he don't stunlock so well. And he can be killed with the flamethrower, sometimes with one shot, or three, or maybe four! So this random switch opens the area where the final bo- Oh god, damn it. Not that you have any indication that that's what it does. Because you go to this door here and it says you need a red key, which is a lie. There's no red key. A switch opens it. And you'll alert the final boss before fighting him. And you can see him. He's taller than the rest of the enemies. I wish I could have shot him from behind this wall, but you know how vertical aiming is in this game. I didn't even know I'd opened that wall up when he blindsides me with his three rocket burst that instantly kills you. DWEEB: "B-b-b-boss! We're trying to get him! It's not my fault he got away!" What I ended up doing was going all the way around this level, killing all the monsters filling up on health and... what the fuck is this? What the fuck? No, fuck you. I am NOT restarting this level again. No way! I will not be stopped by your weird fucking bugs. How do you even steal a bug from Doom? ("What did I get myself into?) ("W H A T D I D I G E T M Y S E L F I N T O ?") ("whatdidigetmyselfinto?") ("Don't you recognize the voice of "D O O O O O O O O M W H E N Y O U H E A R I T?") ("Mojo.")
("Don't you recognize the voice of...") CIVVIE: Okay, big boss. nobody steals my intern... and lives. So he hits me, I run around and I get some health and he kind of stalks this one area while I go and do that. So I hit him a couple of times with the Mambo Grande and he kills himself with his own splash damage. *Slow clapping* SAM: "Dick. Thank God you found me. Are you alright?" DICK: "Everything's cool. Angel. Let's get out of here." SAM: "How can I ever thank you?" "Ooh..." "I have a few ideas you might enjoy." CIVVIE: You can imagine where it goes from here. THE DUDE: "He fixes the cable?" CIVVIE: And the game stops before it becomes a real porno, so I get nothing out of this. Out of curiosity, I went onto the IMDb page to see what else anyone involved in this did. Mostly nothing. A lot of these people were involved in a production company called HollyDreams. Here are some of the titles produced by HollyDreams: Animal Attraction: Carnal Desires. Bare Exposure. Illusions of Sin. Vipers. Secret Needs. Prelude to Love. Talk Dirty. This is the only thing I could find that was put out by Electric Fantasies. The director of photography went on to work on a Star Trek movie, the editor went on to produce and direct this documentary that I've actually heard of, the guy who made the music plays Mojo, like half of these people have one credit to their name and it's Island Peril. Poor bastards. What about Atlantean Interactive Games? Well, I got three credits here, starting with Island Peril, and then Mirage, described as a "non explicit FMV game based on 1994 pornographic movie Shame". which won two - yes, two - Adult Video News Awards. Catfight: The Ultimate Female Fighting Game? *Civvie loses his shit* No! Oh, no. Nooooo. AXE: "Pro Catfight when, Civvie?" CIVVIE: Listen, I'm not any good at fighting games when I'm using TWO hands, okay? Okay, I have to be serious for a minute here, which is awful, and I promise this is the last time it'll happen. Todd, a member of our illustrious Dungeon community, lost his house to a fire on Easter Sunday, and we're trying to help him out. So I've linked his GoFundMe in the description of this video. And according to my analytics, about half of you have made it this far. Please consider donating and remember that any amount helps. Watch this here space for more boomy shooty Pro Doomy content in the near future.
