Retro Shooter Journey: Blood

After bouncing around to these different shooters, working on the site, playing all those Doom (1993) WADs, I finally got to a game that feels like an evolution from Doom II. I jumped ahead in the list as something of a last ditch effort to play something that I thought would be more enjoyable. After I got done with Quake the next item on the list was Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition and thinking about fighting more battle lords or exploding drones made me want to hurl, so I just skipped Duke Nukem and tried out the next item on the list: Powerslave.

I spent about 90 minutes or so with the game and actually quite enjoyed it, but like what happened with Strife, I just didn’t think it fit the genre. Is it really a boomer shooter if one gun is objectively better than everything else, has effectively infinite ammo, and it’s obviously drawing more on Super Metroid than it is on *Doom? *I would argue no. Just like I would argue Strife is drawing more on classic fantasy RPGs than it is on Doom. Both certainly sit in a limbo where it could go either way, neither is so different that I would immediately rule them out like System Shock or Thief. But at the end of the day, they just didn’t have the blood pumping action I was looking for. Same reason I took Marathon off the list. Eventually, I want to go back and hit all the PC first-person games that aren’t boomer shooters. Which I have broadly (and inaccurately) dubbed “immersive-sims” because most people would agree that most of them are immersive-sims, and that word barely meant anything in the first place.

As I kept looking through the list, I realized I needed a reminder that boomer shooters did eventually get to be more fun. I was beginning to question if my memories of *DOOM (2016)—*which I had replayed less than a year ago—were already just rose-tinted memories and the genre had always been plagued by subpar levels with confusing backtracking and switch-hunting. I considered simply booting up DOOM: Eternal, but I knew if I did that it might be months before I got back to playing these older titles. So instead I reached for what I had heard was the best title on the list: Blood.

And finally I got what I had been looking for. Something (other than Doom) that I thought actually lived up to the hype. Something that aged gracefully where I didn’t need to constantly remind myself, “It’s from 1997, these are just problems games had back then.” A game where (most of) the levels flowed from one encounter to the next, where I (almost) never had to just stop and think, “What the fuck am I supposed to do?” A game where the enemies and balance lived in (relative) harmony and you could approach situations in any number of ways, rather than be forced to onto the same weapon again and again. A game dripping with personality and atmosphere that didn’t have anything to do with misogynistic macho mayhem. After finishing the first four episodes (the shareware plus the initial retail release) I was able to sit back and say that I was looking forward to returning to it as I continue through the list. The game is almost acrobatic in it's movement. Here you can see I jump backwards to avoid the explosion of the TNT I throw here to dispatch a group of zombies:

Blood is somehow a game from 1997 that feels as silky smooth as DOOM (2016) and can be nearly as exhilarating an experience*.* There’s a steeper learning curve as you get a feel for the mechanics, and it can feel much more unfair at times, but once you get used to things it gets more and more engaging as you begin to master the mechanics. I enjoyed this game so much I played the first episode three times just to see how the game changed as I got better at it.

I started playing the highest difficulty (at least highest for single-player) and thought it was maybe a bit too tough, so after the first three levels I tried the second highest, but the game just felt wrong if death wasn’t waiting around every corner. Part of what makes the game feel so exciting is the knowledge that you’re beating encounters designed to kill you through sheer wits and ability rather than simply being stronger than your enemies. Something I grew to appreciate in Ninja Gaiden, but Blood thankfully doesn’t take it to that extreme.

It does feel weird to me that the game I consider most emblematic of the boomer shooter genre since Doom (1993) only has two traditional weapons. You have a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun (naturally) and a drum-fed tommy gun, but apart from that you have a variety of fire-based projectile launchers: a flare gun, a napalm launcher, and an improvised flamethrower to name a few. But the vast majority of my kills came from tossing dynamite, and throwing dynamite in this game feels amazing. Blood makes dynamite a deceptively versatile weapon. You can throw it in two ways: contact explosions, or timed explosions. So you can throw it directly at an enemy and turn them into tomato soup, or you can throw it so it bounces around a corner, potentially spaghettifiying an enemy who doesn’t even realize you exist.

While there isn’t much actual “shooting” going on in this boomer shooter, it gives me the exact same feeling as playing one. I run up to a deadly situations full of unique enemies with different abilities and different movesets, and I can let instinct dictate how I should deal with this situation in the way that releases the most endorphins. It’s important to me in these games that I’m not being tasked with the “best” or most “efficient” way of eliminating my targets, but that I can decide what’s the most fun, and be allowed to pursue that path. Which is something that I feel classic Doom fails in. You just don’t have enough options at your disposal to choreograph a proper dance of slaughter. Blood does not hold you back in the same way. There are a few enemies I think demand certain approaches a bit too strongly, but it is easily forgivable considering your vast array of weapons.

One of my favorite examples of the freedom you are given in different situations is this tight hallway full of enemies. The zombies don’t spawn until you enter the hallway, so you are forced to at least drop into the corridor, and jump back out. You could fill the hallway with flames from your flare gun or your napalm launcher, drop huge amounts of TNT into it from above, or turn the hallway into no man’s land with your tommy gun. What I chose to do was utilize my movement to jump along on top of the heads of the enemies dropping proximity-activated TNT. The TNT doesn’t arm until a couple seconds after I drop it, by which time I am very far away, while the zombies are just starting to set it off.

This all isn’t to say the game is perfect. There’s still a few levels where it isn’t obvious what to do next, but it was only maybe one in every five levels or so. Some of the enemies feel poorly tuned as well. In particular, the gargoyles and the hellhounds. Hellhounds are just too fast and do too much damage to feel fair. Your only option is to annihilate them before they even get close. But the real problem, in my opinion, is how resistant they are to fire damage. More than half your arsenal is fire damage, the fire-resistant enemies need to be used sparingly, and shouldn’t demand to be nuked down so quickly. And as for the gargoyles, I’m not sure if it’s the version I played (Refreshed Supply) or what, but the gargoyles would often bug out, fly around open areas extremely quickly, and stay high enough in the sky that I couldn’t hit them. I’d have to crouch down in a low space to try to get them within range to actually kill them. If you were so inclined, you could just outright ignore them when they get stuck in high areas. There’s also the ghost enemies who I think you can only damage with your shotgun or your machine gun, and even then only once they materialize. They totally destroy the flow of an encounter and I found them to be the worst enemy. Thankfully they aren’t too common, but still frequent enough to be annoying.

Once I finished all the content officially released for the game in the 90s, I started thinking about Blood, how it fit into the zeitgeist, and what it means to be a “boomer shooter”. What I find most perplexing about genres is how frequently people use them, but how little thought they actually put into them. I’ve met people who are almost reluctant to even engage in genre discussions, as if they’re scared of them; which I understand to a degree. I hate thinking about music genres as the words are somehow even less meaningful in that context than they are in video games, and thinking about them feels like a waste of time. But unlike music genres, which I have very little use for in my day-to-day life, video game genres actively play a role in how I think about games and how they’ve evolved. Being able to label a group of games as something helps draw parallels between them and capture what I feel when I play a game. Defining genres as how they make me feel makes them useless when using them to communicate with others, but I would argue the broader genre words aren’t that much more useful in the first place.

Blood solidified for me what I’m looking for when I think “boomer shooter”. I want something that challenges me on multiple fronts, at varying paces. Something that can go from careful pre-planning, to an all-out struggle where every millisecond matters, to a cooldown phase where I can take time to look around the room and appreciate the design and atmosphere while also finding supplies or hidden items. To me, that sounds like what all these games are all about. Doom (1993) and Doom (2016), while they are undoubtedly radically different games, still accomplish all three of those things for me. Blood also made me realize that DOOM (2016) might not even be a “boomer shooter” by most people’s standards. While quite different from most shooters at the time of release, it still borrowed more from fast-paced character action games of the time than it did from classic 90s shooters. I have a hard time thinking of it as anything else, as it so clearly is closer to Doom (1993) and Quake than it is to Call of Duty or Battlefield, but for a lot of people I think the term is tied more to a game called Dusk that came out a couple years later, which I only heard about a year ago. From that perspective, “boomer shooters” probably need to be more deliberate and less blood-pumping, have more opaque secrets, and have graphics that are designed to look like they’re from the 90s rather than pay homage to the 90s.

I might play Dusk next just to compare. Doom (2016) makes me feel the same as Blood, which makes me feel the same as Doom (1993), which makes me feel the same as Quake. They’re all the same genre in my head. Even though Dusk might fit what most people call a boomer shooter better than Doom (2016), I bet it will make me feel the same way. And I bet it will have a lot of similarities on paper. I’m also willing to bet the attributes they have in common are the same things I talked about today in regard to Blood. And what else is a genre other than a collection of attributes that make two pieces of media similar?

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