Gunmetal | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Developer(s) | Mad Genius Software |
Publisher(s) | Mad Genius Software Tri Synergy |
Designer(s) | Mike Jackson |
Engine | Custom |
Platform(s) | DOS, Windows |
Release | |
Genre(s) | Action-adventure, first-person shooter |
Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer |
Gunmetal is a first-person shooter video game for the PC. It was developed and distributed by Mad Genius Software in 1998.
The game takes place 300 years in the future. The world is completely controlled by corporations, and the concept of nation is unknown.
The player takes on the role of a newly hired security guard for the Nataka Corporation, a multi-planet organization patterned loosely after mid-20th century Conglomerates such as Siemens A.G., Sara Lee, or General Electric.
The game starts with the outpost suddenly being attacked by enemy forces from Network 53, a branch of the Argus Industrial Corporation and a long-standing ally. Later, the Argus Corporation starts creating a destructive virus, the Keller virus.
The Keller virus quickly assumes control of all other Remote-Piloted Vehicles (RPV's) and many other electronics nearby. As the player was not in the Headquarters while the infection attacked, they are not affected. Following this, a war against the Keller virus takes place. A sole remaining technician named Pamela Lang helps the player travel to wherever their assistance is needed.
After completing some missions, the player is sent to destroy the Keller core, which is inside the Argus base, in which the player finds the Keller core Protection program. After defeating it, the player goes inside the dead body of the Protection program and destroys the Keller core. Upon beating this final level, the player is awarded "Employee of the Month" and is given a video taped congratulation from the President of Nataka.
Gunmetal has 26 published levels, three secret levels, four deathmatch-specific levels, and one easter egg minigame.
Between each level, the player is told a bit about the challenges in the upcoming level through mission briefing. They can then choose to visit an upgrade area where they can buy, sell, and trade weapons, ammo, and vehicle types to use in the mission. A limited amount of credits are given at the start of the game, but by salvaging destroyed enemy RPVs or earning "good employee" bonuses, the player can eventually afford a wide range of weaponry.
The easter egg consists of a side-scrolling minigame called "Gandhi Kong," done in the style of Donkey Kong and starring Mahatma Gandhi.
Gunmetal's game engine was developed by Mad Genius Software. It was not, as many people at the time suspected, a Doom clone. It includes realistic lighting, spotlights, direct sunlight, and partial reflectivity (for reflections in pools and other details). At the time, very few video games had all of these features. It also featured original digital music.
Gunmetal supports the full range of multiplayer options available in 1998. As many as eight players can play over a LAN or the Internet at once, and a split-screen 2-player mode is available for local and online play.
Aggregator | Score |
---|---|
GameRankings | 63% [3] |
Publication | Score |
---|---|
GameSpot | 6.4/10 [4] |
PC Accelerator | 4/10 [5] |
PC Gamer (UK) | 71% [6] |
The game received mixed reviews according to the review aggregation website GameRankings.
Quake II is a 1997 first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the Quake series, but not a direct sequel to Quake. The game's storyline is continued in its expansions and Quake 4.
Descent is a first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Productions in 1995 for MS-DOS, and later for Macintosh, PlayStation, and RISC OS. It popularized a subgenre of FPS games employing six degrees of freedom and was the first FPS to feature entirely true-3D graphics. The player is cast as a mercenary hired to eliminate the threat of a mysterious extraterrestrial computer virus infecting off-world mining robots. In a series of mines throughout the Solar System, the protagonist pilots a spaceship and must locate and destroy the mine's power reactor and escape before being caught in the mine's self-destruction, defeating opposing robots along the way. Players can play online and compete in either deathmatches or cooperate to take on the robots.
An Easter egg is a message, image, or feature hidden in software, a video game, a film, or another — usually electronic — medium. The term used in this manner was coined around 1979 by Steve Wright, the then-Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure, in reference to an Easter egg hunt. The earliest known video game Easter egg is in Moonlander (1973), in which the player tries to land a Lunar module on the moon; if the player opts to fly the module horizontally through several of the game's screens, they encounter a McDonald's restaurant, and if they land next to it the astronaut will visit it instead of standing next to the ship. The earliest known Easter egg in software in general is one placed in the "make" command for PDP-6/PDP-10 computers sometime in October 1967–October 1968, wherein if the user attempts to create a file named "love" by typing "make love", the program responds "not war?" before proceeding.
Adventure is a video game developed by Warren Robinett for the Atari Video Computer System and released in 1980 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a square avatar whose quest is to explore an open-ended environment to find a magical chalice and return it to the golden castle. The game world is populated by roaming enemies: three dragons that can eat the avatar and a bat that randomly steals and hides items around the game world. Adventure introduced new elements to console games, including a play area spanning multiple screens and enemies that continue to move when offscreen.
Uplink is a simulation video game released in 2001 by the British company Introversion Software. The player takes charge of a freelance computer hacker in a fictional futuristic 2010, and must break into foreign computers, complete contracts and purchase new hardware to hack into increasingly harder computer systems.
A minigame is a short game often contained within another video game. A minigame contains different gameplay elements, and is often smaller or more simplistic, than the game in which it is contained. Some video games consist entirely of minigames which tie into an overall theme, such Olympic Decathlon from 1980. Minigames are also used to represent a specific experience, such as hacking or lock picking or scanning an area, that ties into a larger game.
The Game Boy Camera, released as Pocket Camera in Japan, is a Nintendo accessory for the handheld Game Boy game console. It was released on February 21, 1998, in Japan, and manufacturing was ceased in late 2002. As a toy for user-generated content, it can be used to shoot grayscale photographs, edit them or create original drawings, and transfer images between GBC units or to the 64DD art game suite Mario Artist. The accessory featured a 180°-swivel front-facing camera that allowed users to capture selfies. Its images can be printed to thermal paper with the Game Boy Printer. The GBC's cartridge contains minigames based on Nintendo's early games such as the arcade video game Space Fever and the Game & Watch handheld game Ball, and a chiptune music sequencer; photographers have embraced its technological limitations as artistic challenges.
Darwinia is a 2005 real-time tactics and real-time strategy video game for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is the second game developed by Introversion Software, and is set within a computer environment that simulates artificial intelligence. It received favourable reviews and won three awards at the 2006 Independent Games Festival. A multiplayer sequel, Multiwinia, was released for Windows in 2008. Darwinia and Multiwinia were released together as Darwinia+ for the Xbox 360 in 2010.
Descent II is a 1996 first-person shooter game developed by Parallax Software and first published for DOS by Interplay Productions. For the PlayStation, it is known as Descent Maximum. It is the second installment in the Descent video game series and the sequel to Descent. The base of the gameplay remaining the same, the player controls a spaceship from the pilot's perspective and must navigate extrasolar underground mines to locate and destroy their reactors and escape being caught in their self-destructions, while engaging and surviving infected robots, which will attempt to destroy the ship. Unlike other first-person shooters, its six-degrees-of-freedom scheme allows the player to move and rotate in any three-dimensional space and direction.
Fade to Black is a 1995 action-adventure game developed by Delphine Software International and published by Electronic Arts Studios. It is the sequel to the 1992 video game Flashback. The game was released for MS-DOS with full Gouraud-shaded 3D graphics, and PlayStation with fully textured 3D. A version for the Dreamcast was released in 2018 by JoshProd, rebranded as Fade to Black: Flashback 2.
Incoming is a 3D shooter video game developed by Rage Software and published by Interplay. The game was first released for Microsoft Windows in mid-1998, and was followed by a Sega Dreamcast version, which was released in Japan on December 17, 1998, in Europe on October 14, 1999, and in North America on September 15, 1999. Set in the near-future of 2009, the game primarily revolves around controlling vehicles and turrets to fight alien invaders of Earth in one of the campaign modes, the arcade mode, and with or against another player. Some levels include brief real-time strategy segments.
Armored Core is a 1997 third-person shooter mech video game developed by FromSoftware and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation. The game is the first entry in the Armored Core series. A digital port was released in 2007 in Japan and 2015 in North America on the PlayStation Network as a part of the PSone Classics line of games.
Star Trek: Legacy is a 2006 real-time tactics space combat video game for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 developed by Mad Doc Software and published by Bethesda Softworks in association with CBS Paramount Television and CBS Consumer Products. Originally slated for release in the fall of 2006 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Star Trek, the Windows version was not released in North America until December 5, 2006, and the Xbox 360 version until December 15. In Europe, both the PC version and the Xbox 360 version were released on December 22, 2006.
Iron Helix is a FMV adventure video game made for Windows, Macintosh, and the Sega CD. It was an early example of a CD-based game, including video elements integrated with conventional 2D maps and controls. The game was designed by Drew Pictures and distributed by Spectrum Holobyte, with Peter Stone of Xorcist creating the soundtrack as well as all sound design.
Time Commando is an action-adventure computer and video game developed by Adeline Software and published by Electronic Arts in Europe, Activision in America, and Virgin Interactive and Acclaim Entertainment in Japan.
Metal Wolf Chaos is a third-person shooter video game developed by FromSoftware. It originally released in 2004 in Japan for the Xbox. The player takes on the role of fictional United States President Michael Wilson piloting a mech to battle the rebelling military, led by fictional Vice President Richard Hawk. Wilson's mech can be equipped with up to eight weapons selected from a set of over a hundred. In each mission, the player battles through destructible environments, destroying all enemies they come across.
DemonStar is a video game developed by Mountain King Studios and published in 1998. Considered an unofficial sequel to the studio's earlier Raptor: Call of the Shadows, it is a top-down vertically scrolling shooter set in outer space.
Cyber Core is a 1990 vertically scrolling shooter video game developed by Alfa System and published in Japan by Information Global Service (IGS) and in North America by NEC for the TurboGrafx-16. Set in the year 2269 where Earth has been overrun by an alien race known as Hyper Insects, the player controls a Chimera bio-fighter craft, piloted by the enforcer Rad Ralph in order to fend off the invaders and reclaim the planet. Similar to Dragon Spirit, Ralph has a projectile weapon for destroying air-based enemies and a bomb for destroying ground-based enemies.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision. Released worldwide on November 10, 2009, it generated several controversies. One of the most arguably infamous of these controversies is found in the game's fourth level, "No Russian", where the player controls an undercover CIA agent who participates in a mass shooting at a Moscow airport to gain the trust of a Russian terrorist group. This level was largely criticized for allowing players to partake in a terrorist attack, and international versions of the game were subject to censorship due to the level's content. Allegations of homophobic content arose when Infinity Ward released a video titled "Fight Against Grenade Spam". Some video game journalists chastised the video's use of profanity, and that the video's title forms the acronym F.A.G.S., a pejorative for gay people. In response, Infinity Ward removed the video from YouTube. An easter egg referencing the United States policy "don't ask, don't tell" was also seen as homophobic, though most journalists belittled these allegations. The Windows version of the game was also met with criticism from players, when it was revealed that the game would not support dedicated servers among a litany of other changes. Windows players created an online petition to allow for dedicated servers, receiving over 150,000 signatures in ten days. However, despite these controversies, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 grossed $310 million in its first day of release.
Ultimate Custom Night is a freeware point-and-click survival horror video game developed and published by Scott Cawthon. It is the second spin-off installment in the Five Nights at Freddy's series, and the eighth game overall. Featuring over 50 characters from the previous games to fend off against, players can customize each antagonist's difficulty level to either facilitate or hinder survival. They can also customize their office room, and complete various challenges presented by the game.