MadSpace: To Hell and Beyond

This one is a wonderfully weird 90s FPS fever dream. After a painfully long rail-shooter intro, the real game hits you with dual-wielding, hyperbolic geometry levels, portals, drones, and neon alien madness. It’s confusing, janky, and often frustrating, but also strangely fun once you accept its quirks. A great pick if you enjoy retro oddities; probably not for anyone expecting Quake II polish. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3607771351

Wer erinnert sich nicht an Madspace, damals von vor 20 Jahren. Was? Niemand erinnert sicht? Na gut, dann wird das vermutlich einen Grund haben. Langweilige und hässliche Render-Sequenzen in 256 Farben, ein Rails-Shooter ohne jegliches Feedback - und dann explodiert plötzlich dein Schiff und das Spiel (das in Dosbox läuft) stürzt ab. Bis zu dem was man in den Screenshots sieht (FPS?!?) bin ich gar nicht gekommen. Braucht man heute echt nicht mehr. Wer Klassiker spielen will, der spielt Doom oder Quake, für alle anderen gibt es heute viel besseres. Und vom angepriesenen "High Quality Redbook CD Audio" war bei mir auch nichts zu hören, auch wenn im Dateisystem tatsächlich ein CD ISO zu finden ist. [i]Ich habe dieses Spiel aus dem Groupees Badass Bananas Bundle.[/i]

Very interesting old-school shooter with great visual and audio style. There's a lot to take in in terms of controls, and the opening rail shooter segment is pretty meh. The meat of the game however is plenty of fun, and absolutely weird, which is a huge plus for me. The enemies have interesting designs, and there's more non-Euclidean geometry than you could shake a career theoretical physicist at. A large selection of weapons, 10 of which can be held at once, and 2 simultaneous equips give solid combat variety, and even 'boss' weapons can be acquired. Bosses are my main gripe, actually. There's only a few, but they are all equipped with the 'Tracker' which fires a cluster of explosive energy balls that will track you to the end of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stage and then oneshot you.

brillante juego!!!!!! a pesar del tiempo es un juego super recomendable para los mas fans de los shooter. Un apartado artistico muy original. Y un concept art de enemigos brutal. Una musica muy bien lograda para la epoca. Y como si fuera poco una historia alucinante. Que solo aparece al principio. Es un juego que me recordo mucho a la saga descent. Y es por eso que merece ser jugado. No se lo pierdan!!!!

It's mad

MadSpace is without question the weirdest game I've ever played. Enemies explode into pieces that can be picked up and used as ammo, assuming you don't wait too long and they explode. The yellow energy orbs floating around the place will drain your shield on contact, if your suit energy is too full to house all of it and it overflows, with blue orbs doing the same in reverse. I got stuck very early in the first stage because switches don't look anything like switches. All of this is before the non-euclidean geometry and gallery shooter segment at the beginning that never returns. Then you get to some of the weaker elements. A lot of the weapons feel like repeats such as the Exploser, Plauncher, and Flamer (yes, really) which all shoot a projectile straight-on that explodes. The Missile Launcher and Tracker both shoot from one to five homing projectiles that explode. Thinking on it now I'm pretty sure the Lasgun, Megablast, and Needlegun are the only guns that DON'T fire explosives. You'll sometimes walk down a corridor only to take damage from a turret you couldn't see on the ceiling. The jetpack isn't mandatory most of the time, but if you DO run out of fuel you could be stuck. Sometimes you'll need to destroy a wall that doesn't look like it can be destroyed to progress. All that said, I do still recommend MadSpace because nobody else plays around FPS tropes like this. If you don't mind save scumming (and you shouldn't because if the game allows it, the devs are cool with it) this is a wholly unique game worth experiencing.

This is a mediocre port which fails to capitalise on the potential of an underrated game. It runs in DOSBOX, and is therefore bound by the limitations of DOSBOX. Resolution options are finite, and the game only seems to run properly in XVGA and VGA modes. Small Screen technically works, but the game will be treated more like a handheld port (Massive border and alternative HUD), whereas SVGA performs horribly and 3D Max/3D Stereo cause the whole screen to constantly bounce around. Even with the correct settings active, you’ll still encounter horrible frame drops when there are too many entities on screen (Meaning items, enemies, projectiles, etc.), and this issue becomes particularly prevalent on the game’s later levels. Technical issues aside, MadSpace contains some facets of gameplay which were truly ahead of its time, such as non-euclidian geometry and speech recognition (Though it should be noted that I didn’t actually check to see if this worked), and whilst taking what was essentially a game-breaking bug to be avoided at all costs and turning it into a core gameplay mechanic is definitely an interesting concept to play around with, it unfortunately wasn’t enough to carry this game into the spotlight. The original README states that there are twenty-five levels, plus a few secret levels, but I counted at least twenty-seven levels which were absolutely required to progress; one for each letter of the alphabet, plus six short on-rails segments right at the start (Which could be considered one level). Then again, it also states that there’s sixteen player co-op, so you can probably take anything that it says with a grain of salt. Spread amongst these twenty-seven levels are four boss fights, which is where I personally feel that this game is at its weakest (Aside from the very first level). The bosses are essentially giant bullet sponges with high-damage AoE attacks and tracking projectiles, which as you can imagine is not good for the frame rate. A lot of people complain about the level design, but I think most of the confusion once again links back to the DOSBOX restriction. It’s got some unique progression mechanics which can take some time to get used to, but you’ll figure them out after the first few sectors, at which point pathfinding becomes almost second nature. The real villain here is the sprite scaling, projection warping, and other graphical issues commonplace in native DOS software rendering. It can make it extremely easy to overlook small openings or see new paths from afar, and this is complicated even moreso by the verticality brought along by free z-axis movement; something most contemporaries didn’t have to worry about at the time. I think you’ll find that any 3D shooter running in DOSBOX, including the original DOOM, will suffer from some degree confusion due to these issues, although I’m not defending Sector Q or Sector T. The devs are on their own with those two. An actual source port done right would solve most of these issues, but given that Nightdive is currently one of the leading source port developers on Steam and this is their version of the product, I’m afraid I just don’t see it happening anytime soon. I did briefly look into the possibility of DOSBOX hardware acceleration, and it seems like there may be some builds out there which support it, but I didn’t go so far as to actually try running this game in one of said builds. I may sound like a broken record at this point, but maybe someone out there would be willing to remake it in GZDoom. I feel like I could do the maps and enemies myself if I really committed to it, but I have no clue how to go about programming the dual-wield system, vocal recognition, or even the flight mechanics if I’m being completely honest. Even the cutscenes and on-rails segment would prove to be problematic as a solo project. I also thought about recording a longplay as I wasn’t able to find any online, but to be completely honest, I didn’t feel like playing through it a second time just for the few out there who’d actually give a ♥♥♥♥. Maybe I’ll come back to it at some point in the future, but I’ve got my fingers crossed hoping that someone else beats me to it. That said, if you’re a die-hard fan of boomer shooters, it’s worth playing at least once.

Loving both the right+left weapon and the unreal maps (regarding geometry) mechanics. Only projectiles weapons - wasn't sure at first but that is interesting too. Fun little shooter.

Русский клон «Doom», оставляющий противоречивое послевкусие: с одной стороны, у игры грамотный и интересный сюжетный задел, но с другой, она практически не проходима без ноклипа, поскольку в безумных (и частично неевклидовых) лабиринтах коридоров вражеского мазершипа очень легко запутаться.

This is a pretty unique FPS from the peak boomer shooter era. Weapons are weird, story is weird, and it's just weird all around in that way that makes this clearly a '90s creation. The game also starts with space combat, as you approach your main destination. Gameplay is pretty fluid, my only real issue was the mouse sensitivity in the opening part of the game. While it is adjustable, even the lowest setting is a wee bit sporadic for a modern mouse.