An FPS,
1994,
DOS/VGA.
It runs on a 386 or better and supports Roland.
On the Gloom page I elaborated at
length that and why there
weren't a lot of German first-person shooters. Well, maybe I was wrong.
There is indeed a German shooter tradition, though it is not
very well known. One of the most obscure examples is probably
The Hidden Below.
The Hidden Below was released in 1994 by Soft Enterprises. Soft Enterprises didn't have any previous experiences with action titles, not even platformers; two years before, they had released a huge puzzle game with 500 levels, Brain Artifice, on all the platforms of the day, and the year after that another puzzle game, Cube-X, this time for the Amiga only. But the games market was changing, and they wanted to adapt.
In 2004, when I first came across it, there was very little about The Hidden Below on the Internet. I found a couple of screenshots of really deplorable quality, highly compressed JPEGs, but finally I managed to dig up the demo, take some screenshots of my own, and form my own opinion on the game.
Short Review
At first glance, The Hidden Below looks a bit like
Wolfenstein 3D, or rather, since floors and
ceilings are textured, Blake Stone. But the
engine is actually a lot more advanced. Soon you will encounter
diagonal walls, rooms of different height, stairs, slopes. There are
the flickering lights so popular since Doom,
and, far more impressive, the ability to look up and down. This was a
feature of the contemporary Macintosh shooter
Marathon (where it was known as
vidding
), but as far as I know, on the PC this was a first.
There are other nice touches: early in the game, you will find a
computer, which will then give you the automap. There is a variety of
video modes, not just VGA, and for sound, the game even supports
Roland equipment.
The downside is that in spite of all these features, the game simply does not look good, partly due ro the mixed quality of the components. The weapons and the hand that holds them are digitized, some of the textures are very well done; but others are rather crude, as are the enemies, which look simply ridiculous. It's hard to imagine what they are even supposed to look like. Furthermore, most textures do not support the lighting effects of the engine very well. They look unnatural in bright light, and indiscernable in the dark.
On the whole, The Hidden Below is anything but a milestone in the history of 3D shooters. But it may be worthwhile to download the demo and try it out for once.
The Blurb
Death is lurking in these corridors…
Prepare yourself for a 3D journey straight into hell! Take up the fight against a gigantic army of aliens and find deadly secrets hidden deep below earth's surface.
- 20 huge levels with varying design
- 40 different enemies with individual tactics
- 14 different weapon systems and equipment
- infrared targetting system and display
- automatic targetting system
- intros and music with digitized speech
- high quality 3d 16 bit sound effects
- atmospheric soundtrack
- adjustable detail modes with optional high resolution mode for fast PCs
- adjustable viewpoint
With THE HIDDEN BELOW Soft Enterprises has created the first German 3D shooter. It is a complex game with a lot of levels and gameplay.
Created 2005-01-11, last updated 2011-10-08
