[Kerr Avon]

I'm a big fan of Duke Nukem 3D, and Blood!, and I quite like Shadow Warrior 3D, but though I've tried Redneck Rampage a few times on friends' PCs, I've never taken to it at all. A while back, I bought the Whole Blood pack when it was on sale, but the game just doesn't grab me at all. The level design, the gameplay, the humour, etc, none of it works in my opinion, and playing it seems almost like a chore.

So what do you think of Redneck Rampage? Do you find it fun, as good as (or even better) than other Build games, or what?

[Tekedon]

I put the classic build games like this:

1. Blood
2. Duke Nukem 3D
3. Shadow warrior
4. Redneck Rampage
5. Rest of the build games

So in fourth place. it's not the worst for me. I enjoy some aspects of it, but other things I hate.

[Dzierzan]

Comparing to other Build engine games, RR game is very decent. The main RR's issue is its bad map design, there are levels which you can quickly get lost or simply do not see the super small keys. And for some odd reason, developers of this game made keys looking the same, so you never know which key you got, this problem is fixed in RedneckGDX which adds colored keys, plus they're voxelized so they're more visable. Red Nukem port doesn't have it... yet.

Gun play is mediocre, I'd say the weapon design is "safe" which means there's no suprise or anything more extraordinary unlike in Blood (Voodoo Doll).

If you liked other Build engine games then you'll generally enjoy this game as well, despite its flaws. Ohh and it's worth mentioning map design is much more better in other Route 66 and Rides Again.

[Mark]

Previous thread on how people rated the Build games.

https://forums.duke4...post__p__264967

[supergoofy]

Redneck Rampage (RedneckGDX) - All Secrets, No Commentary Playthrough
https://www.youtube....DSG22zRgxMGwHuC

Redneck Rampage: Suckin' Grits in Route 66 (RedneckGDX) - All Secrets No Commentary
https://www.youtube....LOoCJDFs-QuDYGP

Redneck Rampage Rides Again (RedneckGDX) - No Commentary All Secrets
https://www.youtube....TCjnJckzkbtn_KN

Just watch the videos and decide yourself.

[Avoozl]

Honestly I didn't like it near as much as Blood, Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D. It's the one Build game which I just do not like at all.

[necroslut]

No. It has some good aspects, like some of the levels look really good, but it plays poorly - both combat and level design is pretty bad.

[Zaxx]

Not really, if you want a really good Xatrix game then play Kingpin (or Return to Castle Wolfenstein though they developed that game under a different name and I'm sure you've played that one already anyway ).

[NightFright]

Its setting is interesting, but gameplay-wise it's a disaster. Almost invisible keys, switches that you either won't notice or you don't know what they do, lots of backtracking (often without knowing where to go), overpowered enemies, weird weapons. If there's a game worth remembering inside of all this mess, it's surely well hidden.

You don't need to play this IMHO, but playing it once won't kill you, either. I still consider Duke3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood as the holy trinity of Build games. With Ion Maiden surely joining once it's completed.

[axl]

 NightFright, on 02 January 2019 - 01:01 PM, said:

Its setting is interesting, but gameplay-wise it's a disaster. Almost invisible keys, switches that you either won't notice or you don't know what they do, lots of backtracking (often without knowing where to go), overpowered enemies, weird weapons. If there's a game worth remembering inside of all this mess, it's surely well hidden.

You don't need to play this IMHO, but playing it once won't kill you, either. I still consider Duke3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood as the holy trinity of Build games. With Ion Maiden surely joining once it's completed.

Correct. It should get credit for the very goodlooking textures, very good music and interesting theme. But indeed, level design is very complex and gameplay is really not very good. Redneck Rampage Rides Again has the same gameplay issues, but level design and variety is much better.

[Zaxx]

 NightFright, on 02 January 2019 - 01:01 PM, said:

Its setting is interesting, but gameplay-wise it's a disaster. Almost invisible keys, switches that you either won't notice or you don't know what they do, lots of backtracking (often without knowing where to go), overpowered enemies, weird weapons. If there's a game worth remembering inside of all this mess, it's surely well hidden.

This is so true but it also saddens me a bit because whenever I play RR I always see how obvious its flaws are and because they are obvious I know that it could be helped a lot. Activision owns the IP so this will never happen but a rebalanced, fine tuned remaster could make the game shine. I know lots of folks hate the level design but I never found it that confusing, what is killing the game for me is the gameplay bullshit that's so random sometimes I get the feeling I'm playing XCOM without the tactical aspect.

It's kind of the same as Kingpin when it comes to this: that game works much better from the get go but it still has some weird issues thanks to the enemies being bullet sponges BUT if you play it with the rebalance mod called Rags 2 Riches you will see what an awesome shooter it truly is. I mean this is what it adds to the game and once you read it you're like "GOD YES!" :

Spoiler

A texture pack that will enhance and sharpen all skins and textures in the game including the menus.
All enemy health amounts have been edited to make the weapons more devastating.
The maximum ammo that you can hold in your inventory for each weapon has been doubled except for the Flamethrower and the Grenade Launcher.
Flamethrower max ammo amount has been set to 900.
Grenade Launcher max ammo amount has been set to 48.
Ammo pickups for the bullets have been increased from 20 to 26.
Ammo pickups for the flamethrower have been increased from 50 to 100.
The clip size for the pistol has been increased from 10 to 13 rounds.
The player standard health has been set to 50 and the max health is now 100 which makes the game harder and more realistic.
Weapon mods never break or wear out.
Weapon mods now cost more then they did before.
Weapons now cost more then they did before.
The Heavy Machinegun without the cooling mod fires like the Heavy Machinegun with the cooling mod originally did, and the Heavy Machinegun with the cooling mod has almost no break in between it's 3 round bursts. EPIC!
The Tommy Gun's recoil has been halved.
The HMG's recoil has been reduced.
Shotgun reload time has been slightly shortened.
It's a little easier to blow off body parts so now it takes one good shotgun blast to take off someone's head instead of 2 or 3.
Pawn shops now sell all items no matter what map you're on so now if you got the cash you can buy whatever you want at the very first pawn shop in the game. THUG LIFE!
Flamethrower now shoots fire twice the distance it originally did.
The "get cash" cheat now gives 1000 dollars instead of just 100.
New blood splats and bloodpools.
Explosions from rockets & grenades don't gib bodies anymore.
Rockets now do more damage and are no longer weaker then the grenades.
You cannot blow off body parts with the pistol, magnum, silenced pistol, or the tommygun.
Rocket Explosions are now bigger then the grenade explosions.
The Tommy Gun now shoots a little bit faster.

[NightFright]

Kingpin was actually a nice game with beautiful levels. But brutally difficult. "Are you ready to be f***ed, man?" from the game nailed it pretty much.

[Zaxx]

It was brutally difficult but it was all worth it for this ending:

[Mark]

Hopefully I can bring some of the charm of Kingpin in my latest project.

Attached File(s)

•  duke0001.jpg (197.1K)
  Number of downloads: 81

[NightFright]

That Rags 2 Riches mod looks promising, even though I cannot subscribe to that 50/100 HP limitation for the player. The game is hard enough the way it is. Anyway, more powerful weapons may compensate this. Good thing about Q2 engine games is that they should still run on modern systems without issues, even though I wouldn't say no to updated binaries with e.g. 64-bit support.

I hate bullet sponges passionately. Already ruined Heretic for me (but you can fix it e.g. in GZDoom by reducing monster HPs). But RR had more flaws than that. Some may get addressed in ports, though (especially the keys and switches).

[Phredreeke]

Eh... wouldn't that be as simple as editing the HP values in the game's CON files?

[Zaxx]

 NightFright, on 03 January 2019 - 06:56 AM, said:

That Rags 2 Riches mod looks promising, even though I cannot subscribe to that 50/100 HP limitation for the player. The game is hard enough the way it is. Anyway, more powerful weapons may compensate this.

It's fine, I think the mod is a bit easier than the original game. That HP limitation is there because the mod makes your arsenal a lot more effective.

[HulkNukem]

Kingpin has some of my favorite environment design/art.
The first 'hub' is just a dark urban slum area but the second one is this giant underground city, then this cool looking wharf town, then a giant steel mill, through some trainyards and ending in this very open higher end area with skytrams, art deco, towering skyscrapers and lots of verticality.
For a game with such a dark and edgy tone they really put love and care into it.
I'm surprised there hasn't really been a mod or anything that replicates its design, its basically just a hub level with a couple linear levels branching off of it and a bar to get missions. Once you beat it, move onto the next hub with its own theme.

Now Redneck Rampage I haven't played since whenever the demo came out. I liked the theme and the first level was fun enough but I never attempted to play the full thing in earnest. I did the same thing with Blood until about 5 years ago and its become my favorite Build game, so who knows, maybe Redneck Rampage will be my favorite game ever when I eventually play it (likely not)

[Aristotle Gumball]

 HulkNukem, on 06 January 2019 - 01:33 PM, said:

I'm surprised there hasn't really been a mod or anything that replicates its design, its basically just a hub level with a couple linear levels branching off of it and a bar to get missions. Once you beat it, move onto the next hub with its own theme

I've only played Kingpin a little bit, but that description reminds me of VTM Bloodlines.

[Zaxx]

 thricecursed, on 06 January 2019 - 01:39 PM, said:

I've only played Kingpin a little bit, but that description reminds me of VTM Bloodlines.

It's a good comparison, especially considering how Kingpin plays (it's not just your run of the mill shooter: you interact with people, buy weapons and upgrades in shops, hire NPCs to fight for you etc.).

Btw. I'd really love to see a proper HD remaster / remake from Kingpin, I think that game could be amazing with just a bit of polish (the balance Rags 2 Riches already adresses, NPC AI etc.). I love these old, overly ambitious games from the era of early 3D gaming, they all have a bit of Deus Ex in them and that's always a treat to me. Requiem: Avenging Angel is the same: overly ambitious, underappreciated game with a set of great ideas a remake could make shine.

[Jimmy]

You might like Anachronox. It's somewhere between Deus Ex and Mass Effect with a little Final Fantasy/Chrono Trigger thrown in.

[Zaxx]

Anachronox is that old Tom Hall game, right? I've yet to play that one just like Omikron from these old, experimental third person games.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Anachronox is definitely worth playing. The story, world and voice acting are fantastic (and I mean it's really good on that front, one of my all-time favorites), but the gameplay leaves something to be desired. It has shitty J-RPG turn based combat. Omikron seems cool on paper, but it quickly gets boring and irritating when you actually play it. I think I'll give Kingpin a go, that mod seems sweet. Also, anyone know why every Q2 engine game has hideously low res textures? They often looked worse than Q1 based titles IMO.

[NNC]

Redneck Rampage was partly designed by Sverre Kvernmo, who also did some infamous, and almost umplayable maps to Doom II Master Levels...

Too bad this game ended up bad, it has a cool environment, and graphics are much better than any other Build games.

[leilei]

 thricecursed, on 06 January 2019 - 11:57 PM, said:

Also, anyone know why every Q2 engine game has hideously low res textures? They often looked worse than Q1 based titles IMO.

Q2's textures were mostly non-power-of-2 texture sizes, done in resolutions like 320x200 (deluxe paint holdovers yay). Video hardware with 3d acceleration didn't support non-power-of-2 sizes natively until a full decade later. Q2 rounds them down in a downsample on texture upload for its GL renderer.

In addition there's that ugly "intensity" fake gamma stuff that washes out textures that oddly, no game or port bothers to fix, probably due to an ignorance of it actually happening and not knowing the original context (it was done in '97 when there was no one standard way to set host video colors apart from 3dfx's one WGL extension). There's plenty of bad advice abound to "fix" that instead of, well... tearing it out, performing a proper screen gamma process, etc. Many Q2 ports scopecreep and not think about this issue entirely, and there's also "pro player features" revisionism around that, and modulate (setting that bitshifts lightmap data up for a worse flatter appearance with less shading, treated as a "legal" fullbright setting)

Quake's source port scene was aware of both of these issues and therefore more of those ports generally look relatively more faithful and better than Quake2's. Quake2's best looking port is the short-lived DirectQ2...from a veteran port author in the Q1 scene. As far as I know, it still remains to be the only port with pixel shader recreations of the software renderer effects, proper lighting balance without ugly clamping, no 'intensity', nonpowerof2 and proper support for lighting desaturation.

[Zaxx]

I don't know when was the first time I played Quake 2 (I was definitely a bit late to the party) but those graphics were super weird for me too, I just always thought the game looked like shit. You can still sit down to play Quake 1 with its original textures and admire a lot of the art design but Quake 2? No chance in hell, that game looks terrible so some stupid graphics mod like Quake 2 XP is the way to go. I don't like mods that change up the art style of the game (especially these "fan texture projects" where high resolution textures get thrown into the game without any sense of coherence) but Quake 2 needs one.

[High Treason]

Redneck Rampage had all the right ingredients that could have made a good game, but they pissed it away with dumb level design choices, naive artistic choices and seemingly a lack of play testing.
To elaborate; The level layouts are needlessly large and complex, so most of the time you're wandering around wasting ammo, you might be able to find more ammo but it looks just like the garbage on the ground, so you might miss it unless you plan on investigating every individual sprite in the map. The keys are all gray, the doors all look the same, so even if you have a rough idea of the layout, good luck finding out what that key did, that's another 30+ minutes wandering around with no enemies or anything else to do because you already took care of that an hour ago whilst, without realizing, trying to find that gray key you didn't know you needed. Of course enemies will appear again later, at which point they'll be so overpowered that you'll end up dead, realize you forgot to save (likely due to the lack of any threat whilst looking for that door) and have to walk back there again, which way was it? Fuck. You're only gonna die again anyway, because dogs can withstand multiple hits from dynamite and shotguns, there's no point, the game is such a tragic waste.
Looks good though.


Quake 2, on the other hand... that game has no redeeming qualities, it's as though they took everything which made the first one awful and made it even worse to the point of being unbearable. I played the game once, many years ago, when it was still fairly new. It went back in the box, I still have that box, it has never been opened since. Even then we're assuming that it would run, which it probably wouldn't. What you tend to forget with all your flashy ports, is that those ports fix a lot of problems you don't remember any more, largely that ID couldn't code worth shit so their games didn't run right, if they ran at all, or ran slowly due to requiring far more power than their contemporaries for no good reason.

Spoiler

An example of typical ID Software quality;

[Aristotle Gumball]

 leilei, on 07 January 2019 - 05:46 PM, said:

Q2's textures were mostly non-power-of-2 texture sizes, done in resolutions like 320x200 (deluxe paint holdovers yay). Video hardware with 3d acceleration didn't support non-power-of-2 sizes natively until a full decade later. Q2 rounds them down in a downsample on texture upload for its GL renderer.

In addition there's that ugly "intensity" fake gamma stuff that washes out textures that oddly, no game or port bothers to fix, probably due to an ignorance of it actually happening and not knowing the original context (it was done in '97 when there was no one standard way to set host video colors apart from 3dfx's one WGL extension). There's plenty of bad advice abound to "fix" that instead of, well... tearing it out, performing a proper screen gamma process, etc. Many Q2 ports scopecreep and not think about this issue entirely, and there's also "pro player features" revisionism around that, and modulate (setting that bitshifts lightmap data up for a worse flatter appearance with less shading, treated as a "legal" fullbright setting)

Quake's source port scene was aware of both of these issues and therefore more of those ports generally look relatively more faithful and better than Quake2's. Quake2's best looking port is the short-lived DirectQ2...from a veteran port author in the Q1 scene. As far as I know, it still remains to be the only port with pixel shader recreations of the software renderer effects, proper lighting balance without ugly clamping, no 'intensity', nonpowerof2 and proper support for lighting desaturation.

Thanks for that history lesson. I had no idea Q2 downsamples it's textures, that's kinda shocking but explains a lot. http://www.chebmaster.com/q2facelift/ - look at the original, WTF. And yeah, I know what you mean about the fake gamma.

Kingpin looks like ass too, lol. Blurry mess. I played it with that texture mod from R2R, though.

[axl]

 Zaxx, on 07 January 2019 - 09:06 PM, said:

I don't know when was the first time I played Quake 2 (I was definitely a bit late to the party) but those graphics were super weird for me too, I just always thought the game looked like shit. You can still sit down to play Quake 1 with its original textures and admire a lot of the art design but Quake 2? No chance in hell, that game looks terrible so some stupid graphics mod like Quake 2 XP is the way to go. I don't like mods that change up the art style of the game (especially these "fan texture projects" where high resolution textures get thrown into the game without any sense of coherence) but Quake 2 needs one.

Is this for real ? I remember watching Quake 2 for the first time in 1997 and was blown away. And I still find it a very goodlooking game. Although I admit I disable texture filtering nowadays. That makes the game look a lot sharper. Yamagi Quake 2 is a very good source port btw.

[Aristotle Gumball]

I think Q2 had a bigger impact on release because GLQuake hadn't been out long enough and most were used to playing Quake in DOS or at least were used to it looking the way it did in DOS. When I played it, GLQuake had been out for a year, so that was my first exposure to Q1 and it felt like a better looking game, despite the choppy animations. I was like 8 years old back then, so even a child wasn't fooled, lol.