Re: Bye Bye, Monolith

On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 23:20:04 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote at 19:07 this Wednesday (GMT):

      * Aliens vs Predator 2 * Blood * Blood II: The Chosen *
      Claw * Condemned: Criminal Origins * Condemned 2 * Contract
      JACK * FEAR * FEAR 2 * Get Medieval * Gotham City Imposters *
      Gruntz * Guardians of Middle Earth * Matrix Online * Middle
      Earth: Shadow of Mordor * Middle Earth: Shadow of War * No
      One Lives Forever * No One Lives Forever 2 * Sanity: Aiken's
      Artifact * Shogo: Mobile Armor Division * Tex Atomic's Big
      Bot Battles * TNN Outdoors Pro Hunter 2 * Tron 2.0 *

>
It seems they were the ones that Didnt Live Forever :>

<groan>

And no, those kinds of games aren't really my thing. I agree that
companies going under sucks usually.

Monolith had a very mixed reputation with its games. Some of their
titles were quite good; others were terrible, and some fall in
between. You never could be sure what you were getting with the
company. But it was definitely not going to be more of the same. They
always did something different.

Take "Blood" for instance. On the face of it, it was just another
"Doom-clone" using the "Duke Nukem 3D" engine. Except... it was a
horror game. With a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor...and some unexpected
scares... and an unexpectedly deep (for 1990s FPS games) backstory.

Or "Shogo: Mobile Armored Division". It's game-play and visuals were
just awful, but it was a traditional FPS game that was /very/ anime
inspired, and it let you duke it out in giant mechs too (on some
maps).

"No One Lives Forever" --which has been repeatedly mentioned already--
is another example. It had a female protagonist, it had all these
really nifty gimmicks, that same tongue-in-cheek humor, a bunch of
unusual locations and set-pieces. I don't think, its gameplay
mechanically was all that strong but it stood out from every other
game.

Even their lesser known games had their moments. "Claw" was a really
well-done mascot-platformer, unfortunately released years after that
sort of game was popular. "Sanity: Aiken's Artifact" was a fun sci-fi
CRPG that I think a lot of people overlooked because marketing focused
so much on Ice T (the rapper) doing the voice-work for the game.

They had their flops too. "Tex Atomic's Big Bot Battles" was a pretty
uninteresting robot fighting game, largely intended to cash in on the
battle-bots craze. "Blood 2" was just terrible; buggy, poorly
optimized, awful level design... very little about the game was
redeemable. "Gruntz" and "Get Medieval" lacked any real innovation or
imagination.

Like I said, you never knew what sort of game you'd get from Monolith.
It might be a classic, like "F.E.A.R."...or it might be bottom-tier
trash like "Blood 2".