[Daedolon]

Since I'm scouring the depths of Archive.org for all kinds of things, I thought I'd create threads for some of the more interesting games I run across. Though in this particular case, I was reading an issue of PC Format (UK gaming magazine) and saw a preview of this game. As a big huge massive fan of Take No Prisoners (also from 1997 along with Mageslayer and Machine Hunter, great year for top-down shooters), I had to look up more info on the game. Here's a scan of the magazine article in question. Weirdly, all three games were mentioned in the article as well.

It looks like the developer, Ikarion has done quite a few action games in German (though some have translations), which probably explains the fact that I hadn't heard of these games before, their most popular title seems to be Demonworld (1997) (I also found its trailer and uploaded it on YouTube here). The publisher of Project Paradise, Soft-Enterprises, is of only minor interest, seeing that most of their releases are shovelware quality stuff.

The game has copyrights marked for 1994,95 and 96, which leads me to believe it's been quite a while in development, and this shows. The game handles quite a bit poorly, mainly the aiming is terrible. Even with its lite RPG elements, it really is a poor man's Take No Prisoners, but a nice relic of the mid 90s.

Screenshots (×16 @ 640x400)

Spoiler

Demo download
Now, I wasn't able to find the original pp-demo.exe, the extracted version is available on a few CD cover discs (with 3 known variations, mainly some changes in the sizxes few trivial files and the extra PIF shortcut files) and I've included the two I could find here. They are basically the same thing but anyway:

• Demo from PC Player 01/97
  
• Demo from PowerPlay 02/97

To play, create a CONFIG.SYS file to your DOSBox's C:\ and edit it to have FILES=200 (or another similarly large amount), launch Install.exe to install the game. You can just create an emp Note that the game is all in German. Have fun?

[HulkNukem]

I like the 2D art a lot, some of the level art doesn't look half bad either.
Reminds me a lot of Loaded, an underrated but still flawed topdown shooter for the original PS1.
The one thing I will say though is I'm not a fan of how the camera turns when the player does, it becomes a bit jarring sometimes.
I think it would be better if it was like a twin stick shooter with the camera always facing the same direction, but since this was a 1997 game I know twin stick wasn't really a thing on PC

[Daedolon]

There might be some options hidden somewhere so I guess we need to look into the controls a bit more, I felt like CTRL did both lock the screen as well as made you run.

For some reason I forgot Loaded after I started making the thread. Originally the screens reminded me of Loaded and and Machine Hunter, though I got the TNP vibe after trying it out (the game looks less 3D in screenshots than it actually is). I can't remember if Loaded was released for PC ever, but I somehow ended up with 3 copies of Re-Loaded for PC (anyone need a Jewelcase version?)

[MrFlibble]

I've just checked Old-Games RU and they have three demo versions of the game: German demo (c. 33 MiB), English demo (c. 25 MiB) and an early English/partially German demo (c. 15 MiB). I have not tried out any of those yet. All are RAR repacks from coverdisks or the like.

[necroslut]

I strongly remember the cover art for this game, with its insane belt-fed submachinegun...

Spoiler

[MrFlibble]

I checked out two of the demos, there's a screen flickering issue with the hi-res 640x400 mode in DOSBox at default configuration. This is fixed either by switching DOSBox to vesa_oldvbe in the configuration file or by loading S3 VBE/Core 2.0 and Ken Silverman's No-LFB patch before starting the game.