Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (DOS, 1993)

What is it?: An FPS using the Wolfenstein 3D engine, 1993, DOS/VGA.
What computer or emulator will it run on?: I suggest a Pentium. It plays well in DOSBox.
Tags: 3D, on the German Index.

While not a direct sequel, Blake Stone used an improved Wolfenstein 3D engine. Improvements were textures for floors and ceilings and, most important, an automap function, sorely missed in Wolfenstein 3D. Calling this automap also shows your your current progress, rating and percentage of enemies killed. Supposedly there were also some light effects I couldn't make out. Setting here is Sci-Fi, location is an office building/lab. The palette was still bright and EGA-inspired as in Wolfenstein 3D, not dark and dreary as later in Doom.

Apart from the engine improvements, Blake Stone had some nice ideas for gameplay. Not everything that moves is an enemy; some of the techs are informants and should not be shot but interrogated using the space bar. They will give you some hints and food tokens. These you can use at vendor machines for a little health. I liked this idea a bit more than the somewhat unmotivated Backhendl on the floors of Castle Wolfenstein. And there are crates (uh…crates) you can shoot. They will explode and sometimes reveal some goodies.

In spite of all this, the game never really took off. There is something lackluster about it that is reflected in the fan pages I found on the web.

Blake Stone has the strangest copy protection I encountered yet: The game looks for the file_id.diz. If it is missing or otherwise incorrect, you can only play the first level of the first episode. You can save but not reload a game. If you try to play another episode, proceed to the second level, or load a game, it will exit with an error message.

It is uncommon, but actually quite clever. For the function of the file_id.diz is to serve as an identifier for BBSs. BBS software can read it directly out of the archive and display it to the visitor who can then decide whether the archive is worth downloading. So any attempt to upload the full version to a BBS would have resulted in a message similar to the following displayed:

Clever, eh? And BTW no, you cannot use the text passage above to create a valid full version file_id.diz.

System requirements are higher than in Wolfenstein 3D. Apart from reducing the window size you can turn off various things like lighting effects or ceiling and floor textures, but it is simply not a game for a 386. For full enjoyment and all features I suggest a Pentium. If you play it in DOSBox, crank up CPU cycles to about 12000, and best do so before you start the game. As in most FPS games, the Ctrl key is used as the trigger.