So, there's this game coming out named Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War™. This game has a lot of people excited, and it's really cool looking. But, for you to return to someplace, you had to go there in the first place, right? So, some of you may be wondering when you went somewhere with such a funny name, and why you don't remember it. Not to worry, I'll lay down a little history lesson for you, so you don't feel out of place. I wouldn't want you to look like a tourist when you get back there, after all.
Let's set the way-back machine to the year 1992. Since this is 2003, that means 11 years have passed since then. Wow, I feel old all of a sudden. At any rate, computer games were an entirely different breed back then. We were still enjoying the benefits of VGS graphics and eight-bit sound cards (or at least I was). There was no such thing as a Ge-Force video card, and the closest thing to a 3-D accelerator card was the credit card you used to buy your tickets to get onto the roller coaster. "Wow! You've got eightMB of RAM in your PC? COOL!" Seems kind of like the Stone Age, doesn't it?
More than 256 colors? I lost count.
During this time, Id software introduced Wolfenstein 3-D and blew the gaming community's collective mind. It was fast; it had 3 dimensions, an assortment of weapons and plenty of blood and carnage; and it quite naturally won more awards than you can shake a large stick at. By the standards of today, it was pretty tame, but back then, it was the hottest thing around. "Oh, wow, check out all 256 of those colors!" It used all the hardware available at the time and even the Ad Lib sound cards of the day. It required a whopping 80286 machine to run on, which I'm sure really bummed out the XT crowd. In case you don't know, most 80286 machines ran between 6 and 15 MHz. Most machines today are running between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 MHz.
At any rate, it was cool. You basically ran around in a flat world with walls all around you and a ceiling right overhead. There weren't any stairs or elevators, no looking up or down, none of that fancy stuff. But even so, it was the best thing that any of us had seen. The story line went along these lines: You were B.J. Blazkowicz, a prisoner of war that had escaped from a Nazi prison. You were trying to stop a plot by the Evil (of course!) Dr. Schabbs. The Doc had been working on a project to build soldiers out of dead bodies. Icky.
Then, about four months after Wolfenstein 3-D hit shelves, Id released Spear of Destiny. SOD, as it was called, added a bunch of new levels and a lot of zombieish, extra-squishy Nazis to shoot. Of course, these new Bad guys were far tougher than the last batch. After all, sequels and expansions shouldn't be easier than the original.
B.J. is lovin' the Flamethrower.
After that, there emerged a deluge of 3-D games, andWolfenstein faded back into obscurity. Doom,Quake, Duke Nukem, Unreal, Half Life, and countless others came onto the scene. All of these games followed in the footsteps of the original Wolfenstein 3-D. They added new features, better graphics, and all sorts of cool things. Many of them are still recognized as games of legendary stature. But, in the end, the entire genre is based on this one 256-color, 3-D game.
Now, we return to the new version of the game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War. We return with millions of colors, frame rates that are higher than the human eye can detect, true three-dimensional environments, dynamic lighting, CD-quality sound, Internet multiplayer capabilities, a PC version, and two separate games for the two major game consoles. B.J. Blazkowicz is back and on his way back into the lion's den to eliminate another Nazi gambit to control the world. No, he isn't doing it as an 80-year-old man; the games are set in 1943. Will this game be as ground breaking as the first one was? Who knows… but it is definitely a worthy successor.
