Thread by @gravislizard

i'm going to briefly describe two of the strangest obscure late 90s game phenomena that have stuck in my craw, in an attempt to once again make my craw usable

the first is Powerslave. i had a demo of this as a kid and, as usual at the time, i knew exactly what engine it was on the moment I started it. all FPS engines were recognizable from ten feet away back then - it was Build, the Duke Nukem 3D engine.

A few years ago I happened to look up the game and found out it was released for Saturn and Playstation. That makes sense, except I didn't think Build was ported to those platforms.

PS1 and saturn emu weren't options back when i was playing emulated games a lot and the 650mb disc images are a pain to archive so i never played the game until a few months ago

it looks like this. that is *not* the Build engine.

build had sector-based lighting among other things - this just isn't build, I knew that immediately. I didn't think to look it up until yesterday and figure out what the deal was though

Lobotomy Software released this game for Saturn in 1996, started porting it to Playstation, and in the meantime, /made a completely different game from scratch using the same assets/

the moment I started the PS1 version for the first time I said "this isn't the same game." the level design is totally different. I've also learned that the Saturn and PS1 versions had totally different maps, items, etc.

So this company, trying to break into the burgeoning FPS market, released three different games, spending three games' worth of devtime on them, but all with the same name and no indication that they were different experiences.

I do understand why they did this, to a point.
In 1996, true 3D graphics on the PC were a pipe dream. 3D accelerators were nonexistent in the consumer PC market, while the Saturn and PS1 were optimized - albeit poorly - for polygonal graphics.

Quake dropped in June, which essentially established that 3D graphics were possible without dedicated hardware, but Powerslave came out for PC only a few months later. I'm guessing licensing Quake prior to that wasn't possible or affordable.

Porting the polygonal Saturn version to PC was impossible without waiting a year, so picking Build made sense - it really was the best thing going on PC at the time, which is /tragic/ but true.

But the interesting way this comes full circle is that the polygonal Powerslave engine was then used to create *accurate* adaptations of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake for the Saturn.

I adore the chaotic symmetry of this:
Powerslave was inaccurately ported to PC on the Duke Nukem 3D engine, because Quake wasn't available, then its PC-incompatible engine was used to bring Quake and Duke Nukem accurately to console.

this is beautiful but also everyone in 1996 needed to slow the FUCK DOWN

here's the other thing that bugs me:
Duke Nukem: Time To Kill and Duke Nukem: Land Of The Babes are nearly exactly the same game. It's like they made a game, then restarted and took all the exact same steps.

Both start with a ghastly CG FMV with identical plots and late 90s edgelord soundtrack (one is Stabbing Westward, one is Static-X), they're clearly on the same engine and have exactly the same gameplay, but were released like 3 years apart.

This one's less weird than the other but I'm still always thrown for a loop by it. Seriously if you start one game, play for a couple minutes, then start the other, you'll think "this is the same game"