Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold

Blake Stone was released shortly after Doom II hit the markets, and way after it was at the top of everyone's have-to-buy list. This, plus the reality that Blake Stone was based on "older" technology than Doom II made most players completely overlook this title, a decision based on unfair criteria. Yes, Doom II's technology was superior, but it only had that as an advantage. It was a non-squared wolf3d, with more gore. Blake Stone, unlike it, since it used a more limited technology, relied on addding features to the fast corridor FPS games. Medstations supplying medkits to heal yourself, NPCs that you could talk to, backtracking levels, were some of the new additions that Blake Stone provided to the maze fps genre pioneered by id software. Unfortunately, during its time, people were too busy admiring the varying level heights and map mode from Doom II to see them. Some years later with games like Strife, and much later on, with a game called Half Life, Blake Stone had some sort of reinvindication from these games, which included many of the features that it brought to the table, and made these later games their core gameplay's trademark. Highly recommended.

Blake Stone was simply a victim of bad timing. Based on a modified version of Wolfenstein 3D engine, it had everything going for it save one: it was released only a week before the technically far-superior first-person shooter, DOOM. Almost two decades after the release of Blake Stone, it's much easier to look back and judge it on its own merits, comparing it to what came before instead of what came after. Technically, the game was a large improvement on Wolfenstein 3D, adding textured floors and ceilings, one-way doors, barriers that impeded movement but not bullets, and diminishing lighting effects. As well, Blake Stone had features rarely seen in shooters before or since: informants, who looked like enemy scientists but gave ammo and vending-machine tokens when interacted with, forcing you to think before you opened a door and killed everything that moved; vending machines that dispensed food and drink to increase health (or sometimes just broke); an elevator that not only allowed the player to travel to the next level, but to travel BACK to previous levels! All this, combined with satisfying weapons, beautiful 256-color graphics, diverse enemies, and a cool sci-fi setting (including a short comic-book in the manual!), creates a satisfying shooting experience for fans of earlier entries to the genre, and is a good history lesson for all Call of Duty and Halo fanboys, which becomes even more impressive when you realize that the game was created by a core team of only three people. All-in-all, Blake Stone is great shooter from the early days of the genre, and impossible not to recommend at its unbeatable price.

No, it's not the prettiest game around. What do you expect? It's based on the Wolfenstein 3D engine. It also wasn't really all that innovative; I mean, neither food tokens nor people who you aren't supposed to shoot at really affect gameplay in a big way. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because this game is Fun. Yes, that's a capital F there. Fun. You will have to make yourself stop playing this game. You will wonder why, but you will have to force the issue all the same. So don't get bogged down in technical issues, just play the game. You will get your money's worth, I guarantee that.

Yes, this game is actually fully patched and not a 1.00 version like the one that used to be sold elsewhere in the Apogee Throwback Pack. So you won't have to worry about having to patch it yourself as this GOG version is already patched for you. The DOSBOX underlayer is well adjusted and you even get a installer pack for Linux as well. Which was one of the reasons why i bought it. :) I played the shareware version back in 2001 together with some other 90s DOS PC 3D shooters. I loved the enhanced raycast 3D engine from Wolfenstein 3D which in this game now supports texture mapped ceilings and floors. However i always felt Blake Stone to be a LOT harder than Wolfenstein 3D and there is even a lot more to explore. The environment is partially interactive like food dispensers that you can use by collecting coin tokens or asking scientists who give you some. But not all of them are friendly but actually betray and attack you. Which ads quite a lot of uncertainty and making you feel like a spy :) The enemy design is also pretty wild and very cool. The overall game design is very creative and i'm sure if my parents would have had a PC back in the mid 90s, THIS would have been a title i would have played like crazy. Playing it now makes me very nostalgic about the early 2000s when i first discovered titles like this when i finally had a PC on my own and playing several shareware versions of titles like Blake Stone. It is a wonderful modern release that still is exactly the game as you know and i can totally recommend it. Hours of fun :)