By John Walker on January 17th, 2010 at 10:21 pm.
Come here, I want to show you something. It’s this retro piece I’ve written for Eurogamer, about FPS Klingon Honor Guard. It contains passages like this:
I remembered why I so fondly recalled the mag boots. It’s the drifting. Walk forward to gather some momentum, switch off the boots, and then float to the next arm of the vessel as a shortcut, the infinite reaches of space above, below and beside you should you misjudge this jump. Or indeed actually jump. Make it, reach a stable platform, and you reactivate the boots and safely land. It’s sublime. That sense of absolute danger, converted to affixed security at the press of a button. I could happily play a game simply dedicated to this sensation.
You can read the rest of it if you go here.
Ah, Klingon Honor Guard… from the days when “Shaved a couple megs off the memory usage” was a patch note that made a huge difference to my gaming experience…
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Wish my chemistry teacher was that easily distracted. Damned titrations.
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It was my physics teacher that was the easily distracted one – any mention of either Bob Dylan or steam trains and you could guarantee our workload would be cut in half.
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Jedi Knight had the Lightsaber, but Klingon Honor Guard had the Bat’leth! – P’tak! :P
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I think PCZone gave this game 90%+ and called it a classic.
I only got as far as the demo, quickly dismissing it as a horrible brown mess which did a disservice to the Unreal Engine.
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I thought about this game recently. I remember PCG’s review of it but I’ve never actually played it
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Even though KHG was pretty cool, the best weapon ever was the ovum spell in Heretic 2! ;)
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If we’re talking ancient FPS best weapons then I disagree. The Concussion Rifle in the first Dark Forces game was the sheer definition of fun and god like power.
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Its great to see that someone else remembers the screaming blue explody gun from DF.
I’m on a real old FPS kick lately. Is it even possible to get KHG from anywhere anymore?
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I wouldn’t say best but the Blood flaregun is the most hilarious weapon ever. The best weapon is still the DooM 2 super shotgun.
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Hey, if we’re going with shotguns, I’d call Marathon’s Waste-M best.
Or rather, Waste-Ms, plural. Four barrels of joy.
But I still say the Gravity Gun is pretty near the top. Sawblades may not return with it, but toilet kills compensate.
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Thanks for this. I was just thinking about old Star Trek games while waiting for the stupid blasted STO client to download (four days and counting. Damn it, British Telecom, this is not the dark ages). I pull up RPS and here’s a retro on KHG! Appropriate!
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I got given this free when I was a kid, didn’t have a clue what I was doing and I don’t think I ever got past the first level. I may still have it somewhere, but I haven’t seen it for a long time.
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I think I was typing in BASIC programs out of Amstrad Action magazine when this was released…
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An awesome game. I tried to replay it mid-last year, dusting it off for some good old fashioned bat’leth on bat’leth action, but it doesn’t seem to work too well with later technology. It suffered from immense amounts of inconsistent speed, going too slowly at one moment then stupidly fast at the next (ie not actually practically playable), and was irritatingly unstable, crashing regularly. Shame really, I quite enjoyed this one back in the day. There are only a handful of actually worthwhile Star Trek games, but this is one.
Elite Force was better though. And its Quake III engine still runs flawlessly on later technology.
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Armed and Dangerous had the best weapons ever:
Shark Gun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHPvT8zVXT0
plus the world’s smallest black hole, the topsy-turvy bomb, the Guy Fawkes traitor bomb, and he Knock-out Bomb.
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MDK had it better. World’s Most Interesting Bomb, World’s Smallest Nuke…
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+1 for the Land Shark Gun. A&D was looney and hilarious and flawed and brilliant. What other game lets you deploy the World’s Smallest Black Hole in a Cardboard Box? Somewhere there’s a video of the weapons in action with a ridiculously serious voice-over, gotta find it.
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I think Metal Wolf Chaos also had a shark gun.
The President of the United States uses it from his giant robot.
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I always loved the World’s Most Interesting Bomb. City of Heroes/Villains actually has a tribute to it- player Crab Spiders top tier ability is a deployable bomb that has a area taunt pulse for a few seconds before it explodes.
I think you have to go a long way to top Tron 2.0s Disc as a weapon.
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I remember this game being predominately green… not brown? haha. I had fun with it. Unreal games consistently blew my mind until Unreal 2 came out. Then it all went down hill.
Wow I still remember the awe of the first level in Unreal working with 3D acceleration. Don’t think my mind has been blown with gaming (or at least visually) like that since then.
OT: Darksiders is a fantastic game
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“Is that my bat’leth in your chest?!” “I am the hand of Kahless, I am death!”
I loved the one-liners in that game. I wonder if the game still holds up today?
Also has anyone managed to the get the Unreal Tournament enhanced OpenGL, DX9 or DX10 renderers working with the game?
http://www.cwdohnal.com/utglr/
http://kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/
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Next stop: Requiem:Avenging Angel?
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Holy moly I loved that game! Cheezy ‘force’ powers and weak shooting mechanics aside… the hellish depictions were pretty damn bad ass!
Yes for retro on that!
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I still have this, it’s right on the shelf in between Chasm and Die By the Sword. I doubt it works on Windows XP, I’d really like to play through it again. The best part was the power that turned enemies into salt and the sniper rifle that zoomed onto whatever you were aiming at as long as you held the button down (this method found its way into the incredibly enjoyable Matrix mod for Quake 2 which is the only reason I still have Quake 2 installed). That last bit is debatable. Hindsight tells me that it could have done without the endlessly spawning enemies but at the time that totally flew with me.
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Best FPS weapon? SHOGO squeezy toy.
I got this free somewhere a few years back, found it dull and very dated. Gave up after 2 levels.
It doesn’t match up to the quality of the other retro games listed.
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Oh, this is a game I had completely forgotten about.
I seem to remember enjoying it quite a bit, but I expect it was more to do with my youthful blind love of all things Star Trek than it being any good (I even liked Star Trek: The Game Show!) I think my main memories of it was watching bodies spin off into space, with purple blood spurting out of their chest.
It is real shame that there hasn’t been any good Star Trek games and it doesn’t seem like there will be any change to that soon; Star Trek Online looks pretty mediocre, even if I was interested in an MMO. Off the top of my head, I can only think of very few decent Trek games. The old adventure games were probably the best of these, with 25th Anniversary, Judgement Rites (never actually played this one though) and Final Unity being great games. Birth of The Federation I also have fond memories of, although I remember it having a game breaking bug where it would become cripplingly slow after 100 turns. Then you are left with Elite Force, which was a great game, but wasn’t particularly Star Trek-y.
It is a real shame, as the franchise is so vast that there must be loads of good games in it. I would say it has much more potential than Star Wars, for example, where the good games real need to have Jedi in them.
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Wasn’t that game called Dead Space? Or maybe Shattered Horizon…
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Thanks for this. This is interesting. It makes me miss Star Trek. What I miss the most is the klingon bat’leth sword.
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The weapons from KHG work in Unreal, and vice versa. It was so fun playing through Unreal using the Bat’leth. :)
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