Wild Wild West: The Steel Assassin
It has become shockingly obscure, that's what. It is nothing short of my duty to speak out about it.
Here it is on IGN, if you doubt the game's existence or something. It was a very early project by Southpeak Interactive, a game which was developed as a marketing prong to accompany the high-budgeted Wild Wild West movie. Despite being panned by critics for having measly character development and overall cheap gimmickry, it nonetheless laid some of the groundwork for what we now readily recognize as steampunk.
Way back then, when I was still new to the whole Internets thing, I used to take all the advantage I could of that Access1 56k connection. Part of it was using the "holy shit, this is awesome" Streambox VCR to download many game demos (not warez, no - remember: this was before torrents, Kazaa, and even Napster. Warez sites were a horrid roundabout of top-lists, and the real stuff was stuffed around darknets accessible speakeasy-style through IRC contacts). One of these demos was the aforementioned game. I thought it was very interesting. A 2.5D adventure game with combat elements; graphics were excellent (for the time), moreover I was captivated with the possibilities.
Well, a decade later, I downloaded this game after finding a chance link to the ISO. It can't be gotten anywhere except the Internet anymore, and the game makers won't even acknowledge its existence anymore, so downloading it is no disservice. It almost runs on Windows XP. That is to say, there are no crashes and everything seems to work - except overlays. In-game journal pages flicker madly, and some puzzles have an annoying blink effect; but I was ready to put up with all of that, because the game was pretty good. Unfortunately, it's impossible to converse with NPCs: the instant a multiple-choice conversation menu comes up, it vanishes and the game becomes stuck.
Digging around for a solution reveals two things outright: there isn't a single informative forum topic related to this game that comes up on Google, and no patches exist for the game (so it was stable after all, at least). Backtracking from the ISO links, I found a thread from 2007 on a Russian forum that discussed the game. They were talking about some entirely different bug. However, a tip-off solution was there... Reducing hardware acceleration from your graphics adapter, and/or downgrading DirectX. I did so (just the couple ticks, to disable hardware handling of bitmap overlays and stuff); it seemed as though the flickering stopped! Unfortunately, it made my mouse cursor lag badly, so to hell with it. I don't have enough patience when I need to be doing a multitude of other things... To speak nothing of downgrading DirectX.
If you for some reason have Windows 9x, give this game a try. It's not even necessarily a fighting game, since there are two different "paths" you can go on - James West is the path with gunfights and fewer Myst-like puzzles, whereas Artemus Gordon is the path without any overt combat. Probably a significant landmark of sorts in the evolution of steampunk, worth at least that.
Here it is on IGN, if you doubt the game's existence or something. It was a very early project by Southpeak Interactive, a game which was developed as a marketing prong to accompany the high-budgeted Wild Wild West movie. Despite being panned by critics for having measly character development and overall cheap gimmickry, it nonetheless laid some of the groundwork for what we now readily recognize as steampunk.
Way back then, when I was still new to the whole Internets thing, I used to take all the advantage I could of that Access1 56k connection. Part of it was using the "holy shit, this is awesome" Streambox VCR to download many game demos (not warez, no - remember: this was before torrents, Kazaa, and even Napster. Warez sites were a horrid roundabout of top-lists, and the real stuff was stuffed around darknets accessible speakeasy-style through IRC contacts). One of these demos was the aforementioned game. I thought it was very interesting. A 2.5D adventure game with combat elements; graphics were excellent (for the time), moreover I was captivated with the possibilities.
Well, a decade later, I downloaded this game after finding a chance link to the ISO. It can't be gotten anywhere except the Internet anymore, and the game makers won't even acknowledge its existence anymore, so downloading it is no disservice. It almost runs on Windows XP. That is to say, there are no crashes and everything seems to work - except overlays. In-game journal pages flicker madly, and some puzzles have an annoying blink effect; but I was ready to put up with all of that, because the game was pretty good. Unfortunately, it's impossible to converse with NPCs: the instant a multiple-choice conversation menu comes up, it vanishes and the game becomes stuck.
Digging around for a solution reveals two things outright: there isn't a single informative forum topic related to this game that comes up on Google, and no patches exist for the game (so it was stable after all, at least). Backtracking from the ISO links, I found a thread from 2007 on a Russian forum that discussed the game. They were talking about some entirely different bug. However, a tip-off solution was there... Reducing hardware acceleration from your graphics adapter, and/or downgrading DirectX. I did so (just the couple ticks, to disable hardware handling of bitmap overlays and stuff); it seemed as though the flickering stopped! Unfortunately, it made my mouse cursor lag badly, so to hell with it. I don't have enough patience when I need to be doing a multitude of other things... To speak nothing of downgrading DirectX.
If you for some reason have Windows 9x, give this game a try. It's not even necessarily a fighting game, since there are two different "paths" you can go on - James West is the path with gunfights and fewer Myst-like puzzles, whereas Artemus Gordon is the path without any overt combat. Probably a significant landmark of sorts in the evolution of steampunk, worth at least that.