The game was released in 1997 by Shiny Entertainment who are the people also responsible for Earthworm Jim and they certainly did have a bit of a talent for making uniquely strange stuff. The game is about some dude called Kurt who is wearing what is probably the strangest space suit I've ever seen. A dude with a gun arm and a hand vaccum for a head if there's one thing Shiny were good at it was designing interesting looking main characters. Kurt must venture into a number of Land Crawlers, giant alien space ships that are destroying parts of the earth and shoot them up until they aren't doing that any more. There may be more to the plot than that, but I'll address that later.
Gameplay is a pretty basic run and gun type affair. Run through the level until you see something moving, hold down the mouse until it isn't moving and then move on. Each stage is basically just a number of arenas that are broken up by corridors with an occasional puzzle haphazardly slapped in there to try and vary things up but the puzzles usually get no more complicated than "shoot the thing wot we hid". My favorite stage in the game was the one where the monotony gets broken up by surfboarding segments where you drop cows on gun turrets and the soundtrack plays a knock off James Bond theme, it was a lot of fun. Also the powerup for dropping the cows was an Earthworm Jim head so that was a nice little nod to their previous work.
I think though, that if I had played MDK around the time it was new I would have become bored with it very quickly. The game isn't overly long but every level is the same thing of just rooms of enemies connected by corridors. The visual designs of the rooms are varied and can throw you for a loop sometimes but that doesn't prevent the gameplay from feeling a little stale by the end. Yet, playing MDK in 2023 I didn't get that sense of boredom I might have done playing it at time of release. PC gaming of that era has such a vibe to it, a feeling I can't quite articulate properly but you can FEEL it when you play these games. Unreal Tournament has it, Thief has it, Deus Ex has it and MDK certainly has it. I think it has something to do with early 3D combined with the way games were designed back then, the only way I can describe it is as "a vibe".
I did discover after actually finishing the game though that I had been playing kind of a gimped version of the game. Like with a lot of games from this era there are issues of compatibility and MDK was no different. When you fire up the game on Steam you are given the choice between the regular version and the "Glide" version. Instead of looking up what that was I just went ahead and played regular but apparently the regular version is missing cutscenes and things like that. I realized something was wrong when I killed the final boss and the game just abruptly cut to main menu. No ending, no credits roll or anything but by that point I was already done and not about to go back. I have a quad digit backlog over here, if I care that much I'll go watch it on YouTube.
Anyway, nostalgia is one hell of a drug. Not a drug that usually works on me usually, I've found that my opinion on the N64 has soured dramatically over the years, for example, but it certainly got me real good with MDK. Worth a play if you haven't already but might be worth just playing the console version if you can't be bothered wrestling with the keyboard bindings like I had to.
No comments:
Post a Comment