Bruno Mattei, on 04 May 2018 - 11:00 AM, said:
I have a few questions:
Was the damage always this high in the base game? When those shotgun guys get you at close range, all it takes is 2-3 shots at full health to kill you.
No plans for music support?
You can't climb up certain ladders. I had to use NoClip in order to climb out in the 2nd level. That is until I realized that in this source port the Cowpie acts like the Jetpack in Duke 3D.
The shotgun guys are the equivalent of pig cops and they do the exact same damage as pig cops did in Duke3D, which means 49 damage if all 5 pellets hit you.
Speaking of Redneck Rampage, now I know I will get some hate for saying this (especially if there are some people on the forums who like/love RR) but I personally think the RR games are pretty much mediocre at best, I mean I played all 3 games last summer (using some Family Reunion iso I got from some site, which included all 3 games) using DOSBox on the 4th skill and got pretty much every secret using YouTube walkthroughs (only one secret I didn't get was one of unreachable secrets in one of levels of Route 66 I guess) and I didn't find anything special about these games. I wanted to originally post this into the topic "Redneck Rampage corner" many months ago but have forgotten since then and since this topic got bumped recently, I thought I might as well post here.
Now what I didn't like about RR is that it plays pretty much like a shitty version of Duke Nukem 3D. The level design (especially in the main game) is pretty terrible (example the Sewers level), the redneck humor is fucking awful (though I admit some of the lines made me laugh but otherwise too much toilet humor and just unfunny humor in general), there is a lot of backtracking, the weapons feel lackluster, the keys all look the same and are very hard to see, the enemy variety is low and some of the enemies are pretty shitty (no pun intended), the art style is quite ugly (though the textures are higher quality and pretty good) and sometimes there is little health or ammo laying around in some of levels. However unlike other people who don't know too much about how mechanics work in this game, I got used to the mechanics quickly, like the alcohol and food meters. The best is to have both in the green zone because some people don't know that if you have one of the meters in the green zone, you take LESS damage from attacks. For instance, having either meter on the green means 25% damage reduction from attacks (example you take 15 damage instead of 20) and if you have BOTH meters in green zone, you have 75% damage reduction from attacks, so you take like only 5 damage out of 20. However due to the way Duke3D code works, you may notice the following oddities:
-You always take one less hp damage than the damage inflicted number (mostly to hitscan attacks), example if an attack does 20 damage, you actually take 19 damage (and only 14 or 4 respectively if you have the meters in green zone), now I don't know exactly why 1 point of damage is omitted but this is something that happened in original Duke3D as well (you may have noticed pig cops doing like 9 damage) and not sure what causes it.
-The "armor" system in this game (that consists of having the meters in the green zone) is also sometimes ignored if you are low on health and an attack that you are supposed to survive with armor but you don't, example: you have 14 health left and have both meters in green zone but someone hits you with a bullet that normally does 19 damage but was supposed to only do 4 damage here and you still die. This is something that also happened in original Duke3D with the armor that didn't save you from an attack that did the amount of damage either equal or more than current health you had. I think this cause is because of code that checks first for amount of health instead of checking for armor available and because of that if finds that health is not enough, you die anyway (armor also becomes 0 when you die, no matter how much you had before).
Well anyway aside from all these details that are too boring to list, I also found the game quite buggy at times, like one of the levels having broken door that even with key can't be opened and that means you must use some trick with the moonshine to jump on top of building if you don't want to use NOCLIP cheat. And enemies also felt very buggy at times, suffering from poor hit detection (especially the animals) and the dogs especially also having a weird bite attack that eats 10 health away very fast (thankfully with the meters at green, they aren't that bad), sometimes happening even if you just start to run from them, as soon as they attack, they will always hit you, so you must stand far away from them if you don't want to lose a lot of health. Of the normal enemies, I think the worst are the alien hulks and alien vixens, though the hulks could be easily killed with their own weapon and then their corpse had to be blown up quickly, otherwise they resurrect. At least upon exploding, they would always drop their gun which was really good in general. And as for the vixens, well let's say they can be very nasty sometimes due to their...well guns.
I could go on the whole day to point out all the issues about this game. On the other hand there are some good things about RR like the superior level design in Route 66 (I think they had the best designed levels of the RR games, as R66 was done by Sunstorm Interactive who also did Duke DC, Duke Caribbean, Cryptic Passage and Wanton Destruction) and the level progression felt much better and level design overall felt better, better enemy placement, etc. The sequel Rides Again also improved over the original game but in my opinion not as much as Route 66 in terms of level design but at least the new enemies, weapons and the ridable vehicles also improved the gameplay significantly.
As for health and ammo available, earlier I said there were some situations where there was lack of health and ammo but it depends a lot of the level, as there were some levels that had a lot of supplies. And then there were few levels that took away all your weapons but it was no problem getting the guns back in short time. Usually ammo was plentiful and sometimes at end of episode I ended up with full ammo on all weapons, as I knew to conserve ammo for each weapon and not go blindly with just shotgun for example. As for health, it depends a lot what and how you use the types of food and drink and how you balance the meters. Just be careful to not drink too much or if you get drunk, then you must wait some time to make the meter lower or else you are screwed as it's hard to control the player character, especially if you have the alcohol meter in red zone, in which case the image rotates (like if you looked left/right in Duke3d) and stays like that until you vomit. I also read before that it's possible to make the player fall down after drinking too much and sober up a bit later but I never got that to happen in my game, like I said maximum I could get to make view distorted and vomit to return to normal with no loss of health.
Despite all what I said, I don't think it's the worst game I have ever played but I don't think it's as good as some people say it is, as judging from lots of comments on YouTube (especially on GGGmanlives' review of main game who was right in nearly every aspect of the game, yet a lot of people criticized him in comments), people overlook the game's issues with the nostalgia goggles just because they played the game when they were young. I didn't and I'm glad I didn't play it (I didn't even have it anyway) as I would have probably hated it. Instead I grew up with much better games like Duke3D, Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and so on. And even if I also didn't play Blood and Shadow Warrior as kid (as I also didn't have them), I actually found them to be pretty good when I found them about 10 or so years ago and the nostalgia isn't even there in this case, or at least not as much. As such, I prefer Blood and SW over something like Wolfenstein 3D, which I played as kid but didn't found the game that special, though I do realize it was groundbreaking for its time but it didn't age well.
From the big four (or big five if we include the recent Ion Maiden) Build Engine games, I think RR is the weakest of all of them. It has some good moments (especially in R66 and RA) but the game as a whole, feels like a slog and you feel like you want to finish it as soon as possible, so you don't have to play it again.
I still hope the game gets supported someday to EDuke32. With all the game's faults, it will still be a worthy inclusion to the EDuke32 port.
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