An investigation into cult activity surrounding some Ukrainian game from the 90s.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
02:18 - Timestruck
09:35 - Techmutt
15:00 - Riddles of the Sphinx
19:35 - The Short Castles
22:45 - The Weird Dimension
26:02 - The Extra Levels
27:22 - End Credits
Links:
Patrons see episodes early: / civvie11
Twitter: / civvie11
"How'd I Do" arrangement by Noelle - / @ameliedoree
#GameReview #RetroGaming #FreeCivvie
What is the TimeQuake, CV-11?
Lol
It's Slavjank-o-clock
@@MaDDsHoTT hey guys Peter Griffin here to explain the joke. Legendary funnyman Lezardtherapist references a *classic* Civvie gag "What is the time, CV11?" as spoken by iconic character AX3 in the "You Are Empty" Review. You see, this comment is under a video of "TimeQuake", which (Get ready for it) has *TIME* in it's name! Crazy, right? Anyway Like and Subscribe for more Epic joke explanations!
@@BenisDD could you explain the joke about the watermelon, the koala, and the condom? I just can't figure it out.
8:15
Carmack: "I fear no engine, but that *thing*..." (Chasm footage) Carmack: "...it scares me."
Pretty sure they sacrificed something to him. Like a bucket of blood from the team.
@@stefangla6878 oh my.. I had to give thumbs up for that. Thanks for the laughs 🤣👍👍
The level geometry is suuuuuper compromised
@@dustmighte i really feel Chasm's engine is a raycaster with advanced tricks, like for angled walls they made some meshes to simulate them. because i see many of those levels are pretty blocky.
Chasm: "MmmmPhhhh!!"
Civvie having a optimized version of Chasm for years only to later notice it was made by Szymanski is so perfect it feels like fate.
Szymanski didn't make the original game, it's not even in the credits. There was no one from Poland in ActionForms
@@pmak6074 Szymanski isn't from Poland and nobody said he made the game, only a fan optimization for it
@@pmak6074 Read the comment again, slowly
Chekhov's rifle
@@pmak6074 bro there's this thing called reading comprehension
On Chasm's fake 3D, there's a quote from John Carmack that I wish I could find again where he basically said that tech limitations can be resolved with sufficiently clever design. Chasm knows that what you *think* you want is full 3D like Quake, but by playing to its strengths with engaging 2.5D map design and combat while creating a convincing illusion of 3D, your mind just fills in the blanks and makes you think that you're getting everything you wanted. It's almost like good old fashioned stage magic: the only difference between pulling out a card versus making a card "disappear" is to make you look away at just the right moment. It's as much about programming the audience as it is the game.
i still dont get it.
@@lindinle it's black magic
Chasm felt boring because of this and you would soon discover that cool vertical combat and platforming of Quake are impossible in Chasm. It feels even more confined than Doom.
I'm honestly surprised that it doesn't even seem to use Build style *fake* room-over-room, that at least would have opened some possibilities, even if the invisible portals/teleports would have limited their overall use due to physics jank with that sort of thing
@@rdh_gaming that is a valid explanation to me.
You are absolutely right about "it seems they were learning this engine as they went along", exact thing was happening. It started from small team of just graduated programmers and went along until magically acquired funds to finish and distribute the game.
are you implying that they sold timecrack to timechildren to fund the project?
@@utubebgay probably
Ahhh, you remember when game developers could do that without taking 14 years, going bankrupt and getting sued multiple times?
@@lewislewis3531 it’s probably easier to do nowadays than ever
Sad we never we will never have the source for this games engine.
"This is a great loss for our platoon!" He said with a mysteriously cheerful cadence.
Yeah that emphasis on *great* was weird.
Everybody leave a like for this fine gentleman. exiledPostman has been with us since the early days of Retsupurae.
@@12ealDealOfficial 😁
Sssspaace! *in Tim Curry's voice*
Like an eldritch kermit.
I love the line "Try to pay maximum attention" It's such an obviously non-human thing to say but it's still fluent enough english for the voice actor to pass it off as a coherent sentence
It's like something you'd expect the Gman to say.
@@roberte2945 no not really. G-man speaks with a very high level vocabulary and has decent grammar and sentence structure, it's simply that it seems like talking with a mouth is something he's not accustomed to doing.
@@Suiseisexy yes
On the other hand this is an ok line for Russian language, heh
Using "maximum" seems such a specific idiom that the best that computer translations can do in reverse is to turn "full attention" into "(be) fully aware".
This feels like the kind of insane artistic fuckery that come from pure spite at being denied access to the resources other aritsts take for granted. Its like the sculptor who was given shit marble to work with and busted his ass to produce crazy organic looking statues.
Or the dude who denied everyone access to the blackest black and some crazed dude then went on to make the pinkest pink
@@D00000T I love that story so much. In order to buy it on-line you have to sign the following agreement during check-out: "you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into that hands of Anish Kapoor." There is no hate like artist hate.
like 5 guys made the game. impressive. dont know how long it took, it didnt say.
@@JobvanderZwan that sounds like reddit tbh
Y’know, that’s actually the story of the David statue. Michael Angelo saw a shitty piece of marble and saw the statue in it
This game has the feeling of a bunch of young, relatively inexperienced Slavic devs who weren't told certain things were impossible or not worth doing with the tech so just went and did them and overshot needs by a factor of 5, before having to throttle back on others when the deadline loomed.
So, basically the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. devs ?
@@MamaAki The Stalker guys knew their shit, the real problem for them was their shitty manager who paid them like shit (while riding to work in a luxury car) until half the studio left to form 4A games.
These old games have a unique and often beautiful feel because so much in them is inefficient and unconventional and, in many ways, simply wrong. I am something of a student of many technologies, and it's something I see again and again. Early airplanes, early repeating firearms, early automobiles, early iron and then steel ships; all of them have a certain beauty that derives largely from the fact that they aren't nearly perfect or elegant at being what they are. Once we figure out a technology, we homogenize it into something that eventually becomes quite unexciting.
@@brittgardner2923 this game is more like taking one of those things and tricking it out with fancy parts. This is gridbased like wolf 3d not sector based like doom.
@@SevenCompleted That's a fair statement. It's more like how people found ways to hotrod early cars by bolting on big superchargers and modifying the suspension and such.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the fact enemies will change their attacks once you blow limbs off. Like the Jokers will bite you once they lose both arms.
We live in a medieval society © jester
afaik you can even blow off the knights leg and he'll start hopping towards you
@@visionofdisorder "oh tis but a scratch"
Yeah, this was one of the big selling features of this game. Part of what made me buy it at a mall software store when i was a little kiddo.
And the soldiers punch you when you blow their gun hand off
17:46 - the floor is actually meant to explode and drench everything in lava. You see several lava pieces, but the floor remains intact. The "floor" is actually an animated 3D object that's not working properly. That's why you keep dying unless you enter the portal. Edit: Also, I know you don't really cover mods, but we actually "ported" this game to ZDoom. We call it ZRift, and I took it upon myself to recreate all the maps in the Doom editor... The plan was to expand upon the game with new maps and enemies, but the project kind of stopped.
I'm kinda sad to know the development stopped. This game legit needs a sequel, even after 25 years or so.
@@RedDragonLVSSRS me too! I even had a storyline sketched out, with it being a sort of cross between Quake and Half-Life. But there were two problems with the project: 1. The 3D guy kinda went awol, and with him gone I was the only one left (and I don't know 3D modeling). 2. We couldn't figure out how to do the dismembering. We wanted to use an older engine, for the right feel (ZRift being Doom we thought of using Quake). Would probably have found a way in the end, but you can't make a Chasm game without the dismembering!
@@RailedRobin well, I don't know much about programming, but I know my way through blender and low poly designs, and I am a level/game designer by birth. I can't promise anything, but if there is any way to contact you, why don't we talk about it?
@@RailedRobin Eyy, you need someone for 3D? I'm pretty good with low poly meshwork!
@@RedDragonLVSSRS at the moment the project is on ice (if not cancelled) because I'm busy with other stuff. Don't know when/if I'll resume this, but it would be a shame not to make something of it. Add me on discord, same name as here, and I'll invite you to the Chasm channel. You can show some of your work there.
This was the first game I ever saw in stores and asked my Mom for. I was 6. She said no. That figure on the cover, I saw him in my dreams for years and wondered what it meant. That image formed the foundation of my young psyche, but remained a mystery for so long. Now I know the truth and can die peacefully. Thank you Civvie
What I love the most about Civvie's videos is how he talks about the technical side of every game he plays. Learning about the technical build of this game's maps is infinitely interesting to me.
You may like some of Decino content
The game comes with the level editor. And there are a couple of custom made campaigns around, so...
A lot much more informative than gmandies
@@imadrifter That's not hard to achieve
@@imadrifter I haven't watched a gmanlives video in ages.... Oh well
speaking from a 3d modeling perspective, those npc models are genuinely amazingly well done. especially the faces, they look almost like they're using a 2.5d technique or something, completely different than a normal low-poly execution. like, they look almost as though they are animated pixel art, not pre-baked vertex animations
Those are 3d models but the engine itself is mostly 2.5D. It works like ROTT or Wolf3D but it can display polygonal models, not just sprites.
The more I learned about how this game worked, the less I saw the devs as game designers and more as mad scientists hunched over a computer, watching their creation slowly come to life, and ever so subtly muttering “It’s hideous. It’s perfect.”
I had that game and loved it. When everyone was playing Quake, my incredibly outdated Pentium Overdrive (basically an upgraded 486) was playing this baby boy. Quake ran at 5, maybe 8 FPS. Chasm was smoother, probably 25 to 30 FPS. So this was my Quake for years.
That engine is absolutely insane. So this was Timesplitters before Timesplitters was a thing? This game must really be from the future.
Now i wonder if Civvie would do a Timesplitters video. If he does, is he going to play it with a gamepad through emulation or buy Homefront: The Revolution and install Timesplitters 2 Redux in order to play it?
I also wonder if the ancient egypt and time travel in Chasm inspired Serious Sam some years later. ...Also, does Serious Sam count as SlavJank?
Maybe! It's weirdly poetic that I both love this cult shooter with eclectic enemies and settings with a time travelling threat and that other cult shooter with eclectic enemies and settings with a time travelling threat..
@@Catonator To be fair Powerslave had Egyptian themed game way before Serious Sam.
I was thinking more Daikatana. Chasm had the whole "jumping through different historical time periods" thing going on before that one.
Ok, what the developers did to get a 2.5D game to look this good is some kind of dark arcane magic. That is seriously impressive.
John Carmack levels of dark arcane magic.
It blows my mind. How'd they get this running on a 486? If Civvie didn't point out that it's flat, I probably wouldn't have noticed from the footage alone.
It's amazing that they pulled off the look of this game.
Forbidden tech-sorcery
They still used 3D models. If these Ukranian graphics designers managed to make 2D sprites animate that fluid and look 3D, then they would probably get much higher-paying jobs at Disney. If they can make 2D animation that looks 3D, they would probably bring back American mainstream 2D animated films.
The way he said "This is a great loss for our platoon" tells me he only read this line once, and it was during recording, and even though he clearly read the sentence wrong because his tone of voice is happy sounding, they still used it. This is why Civvie cannot overuse the word "Jank." Because the jank just keeps janking. Ain't no party like a Slav Jank party because a Slav Jank party only stops when the game freezes.
I think people misunderstand that "slav jank" is an affectionate term.
@@roberte2945 True, but it's also a way of denoting this kind of game from others. In no other game series will you find frivolous shooting violence being narrated by what sounds like an educational game announcer for a 1st grader. I feel like he's gonna ask me to name a color and a number.
@@roberte2945 WAIT a minute! Civve clearly said in this video "Slav jank is rarely good." Affectionate?
@@harleyjackson3708 Love/Hate, I suppose
This game uses no skeletob-animations, only good old vertex animations. Chasm: the Rift animations looks better than Quake animations because it uses more bits to store vertex positions (16 bits per component instead of 8 in Quake).
haha, i was wondering about that. thanks for explaining.
yeah, probably true. skeletal animations were not a thing in 97 or 96-95 when this game was made.
@@zoltanz288not sure about pc gaming, but on consoles mario 64 had skeletal animations
Getting Doom engine, Build engine, and Quake engine vibes all at the same time. What a weird, magical cocktail. Amazing stuff.
The DoBuQuWo engine
And a little Wolfenstein with the constant ceiling height and the almost constant floor height. :D They used alot of graphics tricks and geometry and 3D doodads to deck out the ceiling at times and make it appear higher or different but as far as i can tell its always the same height.
DUSK also has that same feeling of multiple engines in a game but in the end it's just Unity which goes to show how amazing the team did to make it feel like it.
@@Erikcleric Yes, it's all 128 pixels (or units) tall. When I first discovered this it blew my mind.
Also I heard that Chasm’s engine was coded in Turbo Pascal, though i heard some people say pure x86 assembly, kinda confusing.
I'm always tickled when I see another person acknowledge Chasm's existence. It's like, yeah, I wasn't dreaming, that game was real.
I didn't wake up today expecting a Zardoz sandwich with chasm bread
Thats me with Armed and Delerious. When Ross made his video on that game I felt so weird because I thought it was just some childhood fever dream I had.
Dreaming
If anyone's interested, the game is now officially available on both GOG and Steam, 7 months after this review's release.
Also now available on PS4 and PS5.
@@OnDavidsBrain is it on Xbox
I'll take that as a yes then
@@icravedeath.1200 Not sure, probably.
@@OnDavidsBrain ok, prodeus, ion fury and project warlock are on Xbox so I don't see why it wouldn't, I'll check now.
When you mentioned it being about time travel and having Egypt in it, I kept thinking "what is this, Serious Sam? Are Croteam members of the Chasm Cult too?" Then I got thinking. Game made by slavs featuring teleporting monsters, time travel, Egypt, Medieval Europe, a weird blend of enemies, bosses that are glorified puzzles and engines that managed to get really impressive feats onto low to mid end hardware through the power of proprietary jank. Look at all the time things we can time discover once our time eyes have been time opened
This is such a mishmash of other game's DNA that I constantly feel like I recognize it even though I've never heard of Chasm before.
Chasm's own obviously ascendant DNA has leaked into Doom modding. The first OST track that's properly audible in this video made me sit up and go *"Hold the fuck on, I know that from Strange Aeons", and the same with the double shotgun pump sound effect a minute later.
@@aschtheconjurer SA also used a bunch of Chasm textures, too.
same!
civvie civvie civvie (me revving on in the outro) civvie civvie civ civ ciiiiiviieee
It messes with my head how this feels like it takes cues from Half-Life, Timesplitters, Serious Sam, maybe even Daikatana... and all those games came out after this one.
This game is like one of those "Doom" mods that require the absolute latest version of GZDoom because of all the fancy 3D models and effects and such only available in the modern Doom sourceports. Except it was made two decades before that sort of thing was possible. Are we 100% sure the developers didn't have a time machine?
"time channel" btw, why do you think the games story revolves around travelling through time? sleek nod from the devs ;)
Total Chaos comes in mind
Those kinds of features were possible around the same time as quake (see chasm, dark forces, build, for example..), they just weren't done much because big games went fully 3D.
@@Ehal256 Unfortunately, gaming around the turn of the millennium was completely addicted to its tech. A mediocre game could find success if it had an impressive engine. Likewise an amazing game could be lost to obscurity if they chose to pass on bleeding edge 3D effects and focus on the gameplay.
Don't say that bullshit about Doom mods. Mods that use 3D models have being supported since 2012, most modders will push you to the latest version only because is what they use to test it
What I love about Civvie's reviews is that they include history and development history/facts that I (as a pleb) would not know about, esp at first glance. Like him saying, "This game was made back in time, but feels like a current day boomer shooter rendition that was made today" or w/e (it's a rough quote bear with me). As the video goes on it continues to blow my mind, like it blew his and how he shared those thoughts on "HOW TF DID THEY DO THIS?". etc
Oh God… Cryostatis… that game that has lived in my mind for nearly a decade… Frozen hell in a ship hull, a mix of The Thing, Metro and Ghost Ship… but wholly it’s own thing..
And its engine is the jankiest jank that ever janked. Hell if it doesn't look amazing in its own way, though.
I have good memories. Played it only once, I remember having issues with an AMD card that didn't display an attack properly so it looked like I wasn't firing anything. The atmosphere was great, the story enjoyable; there was a level where you sort of had to rely on sound... Combat was nothing like the other games I played at the time (say, Doom, Serious Sam) but it wasn't the selling point of the game.
Unfortunately it has a habit of not working at all with modern PCs. So we're fucked.
I got that game for my 12th birthday. That was a weird year, for sure.
Me too ever since seeing Cry’s play through
I really, really appreciate how this game made brand-new enemies for all of its chapters. I always like it when games go the extra mile for no reason other than trying to keep the player entertained.
And that's how games are supposed to be. They must entertain you. A forgotten knowledge for nowadays games
@@KeksimusMaximus Idk man, Metroid Dread and Psychonauts 2 were pretty damn entertaining and they came out last year.
@@marcellosilva9286 Resident Evil 8 was pretty good, as well.
Descent 2 does this!
Amid Evil does this. Each chapter has a unique roster of enemies.
I maintain that Chasm makes a perfect prequel to Quake, because it ends with you jumping through a portal to netherrealms unknown...
and a secuel to half life 1 but precuel to half life 2 and i likte to ting it is all true
I've always thought Civvie put care into his videos. But I have a new level of respect after turning on the captions. It's so detailed, even noting music, sound effects, and other audio mutation. This guy goes above and beyond
*Katie
"it's like english in the uncanny valley" what a marvelous quote
i have a theory about shotguns in slavic games. in the west, the shotgun has a certain image. its a rebel's weapon. the germans tried to declare their use by the USA a warcrime. it's a defender's weapon used to secure stagecoaches. a shotgun's blast is like a shout of defiance. in russia, when you get a firearms license, at first you may only purchase shotguns. they are a poor hunter's weapon. they kill birds and small game. a young child might be taught basic firearms skills and safety with a shotgun. theyre weapons barely fit for war, and only the desperate would take one over say, a rifle. so in western games theyre made punchy and powerful. and in slavic games, theyre kinda meh.
That... 1: is culturally true, perspective-wise and 2: if we assume that's a subconscious idea in dev's heads, it explains a lot. ...like a doublebarrel 12ga blast in OG Stalker doing less damage to a bandit in a leather jacket than a makarov pistol 🙄
well... I mean, they are a hunting weapon, rarely useful for war. Only good for CQB. Besides most games have it in buck or birdshot, not the slugs, which are a lot more effective in dealing damage. Besides, most games care only for the pump action or double barrel variety, rarely for the semi auto and auto types. Because having a belt fed scattershot is too much, or an elephant gun.
Makes a ton of sense, really.
Interesting observation. The first ever gun I fired was a semi-auto 12-gauge when I was 13. Also in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games seems like shotguns take a back seat compared to ARs.
@@cactusmann5542 Eh, in most games the range of a shotgun is underestimated heavily and the spread is overestimated
The way that engine combines 2.5D with real 3D models is so ingenuos that it almost feel like what modern retro games do when they're trying to do some black magic with a source port of the Doom engine, and I really dig the resulting aesthetic. Also as someone who speaks English as a second language I love when someone pulls off that slightly odd but perfectly understandable text that only a person that sees English as a puzzle can produce.
I see lots of comments from people who don't understand how Chasm's engine works, so here's a small description: - Floor and ceiling textures are grid based. Walls however, can be placed wherever you want and at any angle. - Just like in Wolfenstein 3D, there's no height variation, although you can fake small stairs or ceilings using 3D models. - Lighting works just like in Quake; you place a point light, set the radius and the brightness, and then the engine renders it and draws the shadows. This is very cool because some of these light sources can be destroyed (if you shoot a lamp), activated (with a switch, or when entering a room) or set to spin in circles, like the one at 10:34.
Brutal
Thank you for the info! This shit is super interesting to me
Well said! I remember realizing Chasm engine was a fancier RoTT after reaching the third level or something. Up to that point I was quite amazed at the tiny details like flapping window and papers. It´s still a very charmy game and Civie11 a warrior willing to endure any challenge!
I know nothing of programming or level design, but this seems really impressive. Did this lead to a game that would deliver a Quakelike experience on PCs that struggled to run Quake, or was it merely a benefit to the devs?
Hola Perro Seco! Soy de Arcades3D! Y creo que Gambini también, no?
Chasm The Rift was marketed as Quake alternative which can be played on 486 PCs. There were several late 486 based chips overclocked to hell, with pretty good performance in tasks architecture was designed for, but lacking new instruction sets, changes and upgrades introduced in Pentium, they were still not up to scratch when it came to running Quake. Chasm engine is built exactly around these limitations to make it run on those later day 486 chipset systems. Funnily enough, when I've played it for the first time, I was really annoyed that it isn't fully 3D. Years have passed an I had a blast with Project Warlock, which is even less 3D in design, lol.
It's amazing how the IT guy's voice sounds like a perfect mix of the HL1 scientist and Alex Jacobson from Deus Ex.
4:35 Civvie's tangent about the "Timestrikers" made me think about him making a video about the Timesplitters franchise, that'd be cool.
Pro timesplitters when?
Or Timeshift, to go on with the theme of slav time-jank.
It's time to split
I'd totally be game for a Civvie Timesplitters special. It'd take a lot of doing, but he's no stranger to that format, as we've seen from his Serious Sam video. Also, I have fond memories of the TimeSplitters games, mainly because I played them with a friend who I haven't heard from in about 15-20 years.
@@averageeclairenjoyer3010 god Timeshift was good
I was always impressed by Chasm. Yes, even at the time I recognised that the levels all had that flat plane that so many Wolfenstein-esque Doom clones did, but the game was inventive in finding cool ways around that (unlike, say, any game by Capstone).
He sounds suspiciously like AX3.
I remember playing the demo of Chasm before playing Quake. The visual leap from Doom was huuuge, specially in that first level, seeing the raindrops and everything.
Civ: "What kind of game demands this level of devotion?" Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines: *LAUGHING IN THE DISTANCE*
RIP Troika, they were too good for this world... and not chance to create something this good these days, that's for sure. Firing the sole Troika member don't help either....
*company goes bankrupt* *continues patching game unpaid for like a year* *inspires a community to actively and continuously develop patches and content for closing in on 20 years*
@@BobsBurgers1234 I stopped uninstalling it a few years ago for this very reason. It's a perma-prog now along side Typing of the Dead and Fallout New Vegas.
VtM:B when Civvie?
Edit: I commented again further down but people seemingly still haven't seen so to clarify, this post is mostly a joke. Fun fact about VtM:B: it was (afaik) ready to release before Half-Life 2, but was put on hold by Valve because they wanted HL2 out first. Imagine if VtM:B released first, would HL2 have sold as well as it did? Would we have seen the release of HL2 Ep3 and Ravenholm? Probably not that last part but I feel like we narrowly avoided an alternate history where Half Life became either cult or VtM:B sold well.
That impressive spinning light is probably made by animating the textures on the walls, which is a ridiculously neat effect for a game that doesn't have modern dynamic lighting. Shows just how much effort went into the game to make the engine seem like more than it actually is.
The engine did have dynamic lighting, which is even more impressive. For example you can destroy light sources, and many weapon projectiles make the same dynamic light effects. Check out the game's assets, you won't find such animated textures there.
In Duke Nukem 3D like Doom they had "sectors" which can have their own brightness. Thats how they did the shadows thats why they are extremely sharp. So you just make sectors in a circular fashion (like a sliced round pie) and then make each "slice" dynamically change it's brightness
@@rgerber Yep. Chasm didn't even have sectors, in essence the whole level is one big sector. The floor and ceiling are laid out on a grid, and you can change the texture and other properties of these tiles. It's very interesting how the engine was more limited than Doom in some aspects, yet it had many features that were more advanced than Quake.
@@rgerber This looks more like Wolfenstiein 3D with 3D modelling support more than the Doom or Build engine. The limitations of level height would also explain that , also if you look closely about the width o the walls, seems like they are grid based , again like Wolf3D. And the details all seems to be done with 3D models. So there's no such things as sectors.
@@Dude27th The vertices of the walls are snapped to the grid, but the walls themselves can be at any angle. You can see angled walls at a few places, but it's used sparingly as the floor/ceiling are textured on a grid.
20:06 "Best to take cover and fire at his saw hand to eliminate his ranged attack." So this game had enemy weak spots that, when damaged, disables certain attacks and thus makes that enemy safer to engage. Y'know, like in Doom Eternal. *This game beat Eternal to the punch by 23 years.*
You didn't seriously think that Eternal invented the concept of weak points right?
@@lordmuhehe4605 No but Eternal is one of the more well known games to have such a system, and that system is very prominent and important in the main gameplay loop. Also Eternal is a more retro type of fps so I felt like the comparison was justified and made sense.
@@lordmuhehe4605 Leave him alone, the guy must have been on the face of the earth for less than 2 years. It's an achievement that he can type proper english already.
@@Vsjdjdbajsnehevsjalfkghshakakd Doom 2016 is under a skin a doomified Painkiller. Action Form's Vivisector was AFAIK supposed to have more advanced version of this, but they left only visual part of their procedural damage system that allowed to shoot out flesh of enemies.
Another early game to have weak points was Halo Combat Evolved. Some of the vehicles had weak points that did more damage to the vehicle when you shot that particular part. The Wraith tank could be brought down with just a few rockets if you shot the cannon, but it took more if you shot the hull. Most notably, some of the Flood Combat forms had a big whip arm that they would try to attack you with. If you blew this arm off with a shotgun, they couldn't attack you with it anymore, reducing the threat they pose against you.
This game deserves a proper remastered version. Nightdive Studios can you hear me?
Considering how they just did a remaster for Power Slave, your prayers are probably answered
Actually asked the head of Nightdive and he said they'd love to do it, but can't because of how messy the licensing of the IP is
@@Beanibirb Sad to hear it, seems like we'll have to settle for the dosbox version...
@@Beanibirb So basically the same situation as Blood
@@Beanibirb Reminds me of the situation with No One Lives Forever. Also interesting is Night Dive is hoping one day they can convince Nintendo to let them remaster Eternal Darkness, the CEO said it himself.
"That's like a skinwalker sentence" oh god what have you done. You've added a new phrase to my lexicon
that skinwussy do be poppin'
Try to pay maximum attention, Mr. Anderson.
That’s what always happens at Jank O’Clock.
@@BrynjaHjartans none of these words are in any religious text
The impostors, shape-shifters, fakebeangs... And most famous of all, the *skinwalkers*
I like to imagine that whenever there are those dialogue-kind of cutscene things, that the guy youre talking to is just holding both of your hands and gets really close to you
I remember back in 1999, going to a computer show in town with my dad and seeing this game for $5, so my dad bought it for me had I played the living hell out of it. I remember thinking it was a pretty cool quake inspired game and really being into the dismemberment mechanics
There's something about Strickland's voice actor I am in absolute love with. I can't pin it down exactly, but it sounds like the voice actor was told, "Make him sound like a complete comic stereotype of a nerd" and the actor went, "Sure thing," and instead went 100% in with trying to make him sound genuine and believably nerdy instead
Nah that’s cartoony nerd to me, unbelievable in almost every way
Loved Chasm: The Rift back in the day. Bought the big box back in 97'. It still blows my mind how well the game ran on a 486. The software rendered graphics where so good for the time and had a blast playing through it!
albeit a very beefy 486, the 100MHz variant because Pentiums was still a bit expensive back then.
@@Crixer234 indeed. I was running it on a AMD 5x86 133mhz at the time. So smooth! I actually enjoyed playing it more than quake on that system because the framerate was so much better.
gotta love the blade gun
Well it's essentially a Wolfenstein clone with basic flat geo. Of course it would run better than Quake!
@@Crixer234 beefy? A computer is not biological.
I especially like how the devs travelled to the future to hire Sam Hyde as the scientist guy... impressive attention to detail and commitment to the gimmick there
He CAN'T keep getting away with it!
I go about my day pretty normally I'm a cool guy I'm a swell guy
He´s your top guy.
@@jogginnoggins9918 Your elite shock trooper
Looks like steven spielberg to me
You want to know how cult this is? Some chads spent an insane amount of time reverse engineering the game, assets and all. THEN remade the entire game using a pixel perfect software render as well as a gl renderer. Apparently it was a custom engine originally. Would of so played it back in the game if I had it.
Some people really have too much time on their hands
Honestly this game feels familiar even though I have never seen it before, this is like that missing evolutionary link between then and now, and the game itself looks more like a new retro shooter than actuall new retro shooters, the game really had something going with the time travel narrative, since it itself looks like it was made some 25 years after it's release
The enemy name "Gross" is german for "big" or "tall". And the enemy named "Faust" is german for "Fist".
Probably a reference to the (in)famous Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon, as the enemy holds a big rocket launcher.
Reminds me of the joke where a father brings his daughter in the men's room. As he's finishing up, his daughter catches a glimpse of another man's penis at the Urinal. She lets out a "Gross!". The man replies "Danke". Turns out the random man was German.
@@HerrCherno I thought of this too, immediately after seeing it. It for sure is a reference to the Panzerfaust.
Isn't it spelt "groß"
@@Slateproc long o, so ß, yes.
The machine spirit blessed them when they were making this engine. Knowledge since lost... maybe for the better
Sup Big E! Where them fembot STCs at?
@@MoebiusPan They were consumed by the birth of Slaanesh during the Age of Strife... 😒
@@MoebiusPan The Thousand Sons got to them.
Praise the emperor
Do something about these fucking Drukhari man. They're creeping me out in all that bondage gear.
I remember playing this game as a kid, and after a while realizing it *felt* more 3D than Quake. Its hard to say exactly why, probably a hundred audiovisual details.
12:51 What's great about this bit in the manual is that it's basically a multi-level bilingual historical reference dad joke. The name "Faust" is, probably aside from the tale of demonic deals gone wrong, most commonly associated with the Panzerfaust recoilless gun, hence the rocket launcher. But it also means "fist" in German. So yeah, "Fist" packs a punch.
I was waiting this video since years. The first time i played Chasm was in 1997 in a demo cd magazine. I had a Pentium 90Mhz...and i was litterally astonished by its graphic. I played Quake after some months but it didn't impress me as much Chasm did also because it was lot more demanding in hardware requirements and enviroments didn't change a lot while Chasm had four distinctive levels. It's an historical piece in fps genre. Then the graphic it's the perfect mix of bitmap artwork and low poligons that it's so common these days in the retro-style videogames. It litterally seems a modern indie fps
Hey, do you remember that were the assets different? I remember Chasm demo/preview but it to my remembering looked very different, like guns and items. But that Jester is definitely pretty much what I remember so it has to be the same game. Just curios that do I remember things so badly.
"environments didn't change a lot while Chasm had four distinctive levels." Uhhh, what Quake did you play? Quake had 4 episodes that looked different from each other. Even though ep. 4 re-used some of the medieval textures from ep. 2 (probably because they had to rush to meet the deadline), it still did look distinct enough. Not to mention the techbase maps in the beginning of each episode, bringing the different environments to 5. Besides, map architecture was significantly more complex than Chasm's, so of course Quake required better hardware.
@@jothain I remember an older test version, which I seem to recall ran fine on a 486 and must have come on 2 floppies, don't recall the HUD looking as fancy as this m.kzhead.info/sun/lc-jaNJsaKGcp58/bejne.html but the UI seems familiar, and the executioner.
What Civvie usually forgets to mention, when it comes to "slav jank" games, is that they were made on 10.000th of a budget that most western developers have at their disposal and in most cases start as passion projects, that the teams are usually localized and extremely small in numbers, having additional difficulty of finding a decent publisher who will put the game on store shelves worldwide. So It all boils down to recognizing when a genuine effort has been made and for me, who played and finished Chasm three years ago for the first time, it was quite an enjoyable and technically impressive game that got undeservingly pushed to the side cause it carried a certain "stigma". A stigma of being a Quake clone. Oh, and it came from *insert slavic country here*, lets not forget that.
The term "slav jank" is meant with endearment I believe. I certainly use it that way. In that it kind of conveys everything you just said, but I agree it's worth stating outright.
@@irritablerodent Yeah, "slav jank" is like "boomer shooter." It's an affectionate term.
Being accused of being a clone of a game two engine generations after it is in a way a compliment.
we supposed to care that they're poor? a product is either good or it isn't. the amount of money involved is irrelevant.
@@mrosskne Maybe, but "bad" games often have value too. That's kind of what this whole channel is about. A bad game made with passion and drive by developers under impossible circumstances is infinity more interesting that a blandly bad game churned out by dispassionate developers only working for a paycheck.
It's amazing how all it took me to find this game was a civvie video. I've been looking for it literally for years, played it when I was like 7 or 8 since then I've had it in mind trying to find it.
Remember the time, when I stayed at school after hours to have a chance to play this thing on the computer lab's 486 IBM PC. Spend shit-ton of time to figure out how to beat the first boss, "Батька" ("Daddy" in the original Russian version of the game) though. Even in the post-Soviet countries, this thing was not well known. Everybody thought that this is a Quake clone or smth
You had IBMs at your school? Impressive! I don't know what computers we had in my schools (I've changed schools twice), but I'm pretty sure they weren't IBMs. Then again, I went to school in 2000, and had computer class in around 2007, so that might be the reason. xD But yeah, Chasm was pretty obscure in Moldova. I did know of Carnivores though.
@@gheorghemosneaga5975 IBM PCs became a thing in Russian schools around '96-'97 (so about time this game came out). Prior to that they had "Agath" - a soviet Apple II clone and ZX Spectrum clones. I went to school right as the change was happening and got my first few lessons in "Computer sciense" on Agaths. Our school skipped the 486's and went for the P-133Mhz in the 97'.
3:42 This model looks ridiculously fucking good, almost reminds me a bit of illustrated art.
I was gonna note it, I'd dare say that character looks even better than those from the first Half-Life, maybe even better than Deus Ex!
lol? it's mostly pillow shading. i'd fire anybody who submitted this professionally
@@mrosskne consider this was made in 1997
@@irpsicologiayeducaciongrup8251 I don't care. A thing is either good or it isn't. There are no awards for effort.
@@mrosskne gonna shit myself because a low budget, amateur indie game from 20 years ago doesnt have objectively perfect art. Smhmh
This game's limb dismemberment was always one of my favourite things about it, really helped make the combat feel much more satisfying, even more-so than Quake Imo. I really wish more shooters nowadays had it
Much later (and originally Japan only), Shadow Tower: Abyss had quite a bit of fun with limb dismemberment and gun-play as well. Blasting the wings off of flying enemies and watching them fall victim to gravity, or blasting someone's head off with a shotgun doesn't get old. It really is unfortunate so few games have dared to use such systems.
Usually, developers are unwilling to implement these kind of features unless they build the game around them, like Dead Space. These devs were willing to implement it into Chasm and Vivisector purely as a secondary feature, which is impressive.
*cough* Jedi Outcast's original awesome combat *cough* (You can re-enable it with console commands btw! Lightsaber fighting has never been better!!!)
I love how HROT fully expands on the feel of Chasm: The Rift. It is equally detailed all the way through.
So much it makes me wonder why they called it HROT instead of being honest and just going for Czasm 😂
I've always liked Chasm. The music, environmental sounds, and enemy sounds give it a lot of atmosphere. It has really good low poly models that further add to that sense of place. The weapon firing and pickup sounds are really crunchy, distinctive, and that audio mixed with the dismemberment mechanic it makes the combat feel satisfying and fun. Due to the heavy use of static meshes you just don't even notice the levels are actually Wolf3D type mazes. More importantly the levels are small; they never get as sprawling as the maps in Wolf3D or other games with similar flat maze maps. This means that rooms tend to look different; there's not enough space to recycle meshes or textures too often. Chasm has a cult following because of its good aesthetic qualities that make it atmospheric and fun to play, plus the ingenious tech trickery further adds to the atmosphere while making it more playable than virtually any other flat maze type game from that era (or even some modern with levels like this). Its a modest product that punches above its weight.
10:27 Ironically, the Varginha Incident actually is true 3D.
*WHAT*
@@abhinandanil7775 indeed it does.
"I'm gonna finish that game some day." Some day:
But this day is not today!
10:50 Nucular never dies.
bruh non mi aspettavo di trovarla sotto un video di civvie. Lei signore ha del buon gusto
Dukular Nukular
Fun fact: Chasm, The Rift is on Switch, I brought it recently because of this video and honestly? It's actually really fucking good
No, it's not
I played this back in the day and always thought it weird how you couldn't look completely up or down. The 2D/3D thing makes so much sense now.
This game's minigun looks exactly like Unreal's stinger, but this is older. Epic has some 'splaining to do.
ehhhh although the similarity is how i first learned about chasm, unreal's weapons were designed to look good in left handed view first and right handed view came later. The left handed stinger looks nothing like chasm's chaingun and it was most likely just a fun coincidence, lol.
@@xanious3759 a left or right handed view has nothing to do with a weapons design.
@@modernmobster the left handed mesh shows more of the actual mesh while the right handed view mostly just shows the muzzle. A couple weapons in unreal 1 have very different looking left handed views, some of which like minigun and stinger id argue look a little more interesting handedness does play into weapon design if they're not just mirroring, a lot of realistic firearms in oldet games will be mirrored to show the "wrong side" just because its more visually interesting.
Not to mention how Unreal's Razorjack seems functionally similar to the Buzzaw weapon from Chasm
22:33 Damn. I did not expect that reference. Civvie goes deep.
What is it a reference to?
@@Snake-pg2jh old movie called Zardoz with Sean Connery wearing red hooker boots and red speedos. You get that line at the begining of the movie and I think the trailer.
probably saw it in "The sky may be"
27:03 ironic as it is, this might be a much bigger pain to run Cryostasis properly on any modern system than it is to run any of those 90s retro-games. Although the game itself sure deserves taking a look at.
My friends used to laugh at me for enjoying Chasm. When I mention it today... they still laugh at me. And I still enjoy it.
haha🤣
14:22 whoa, crazy Gordon Freeman cameo'd in Chasm a year before Half-Life
ahahaha! LOL!
"New Retro Throwback Made in the Past" is an accurate way to describe everything Slavic
As a kid I saved my pennies enough to buy the bundle pack of Quake with both expansions that Electronics Boutique had shrink wrapped together. Chasm was on the shelf next to it and I just happened to have almost enough money for it too. Box art got me, as good box art should, so I conned my mom into making up the difference, and I'm glad I did. I definitely figured out something was weird about this game's construction. At the time, compared to Quake giving me my first taste of true 3D shooters, I thought Chasm was just a crappy 3D engine, but now that Civvie has educated me a bit, apparently it's actually the final boss of 2.5D. Good to know other people remember this game fondly. Even though I was initially disappointed with the rather flat maps, I still enjoyed it and it left a fairly deep impression in my memory.
That Zardoz audio clip came out of nowhere to give me the biggest giggle fit of my month so far. God, that movie is strange.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one to get that reference. 🤣
I actually haven't seen the film but, knowing that there's some misandryist cult or societal group, I kinda assumed that's where it's from. Plus, leave it to the film with ponytail Sean Connery in a speedo and a giant floating head to have a line as bizarre as that.
@@UnfitElvis3rd It is indeed from Zardoz. Watch the movie please, it's better than it has any right to be.
Cryostasis is great and way ahead of its time ! Having said that it had lots of technical issues although i was lucky and did not experience almost any.
Seconded! Cryostasis is a wonderfully atmospheric experience with some genuine artistry (without being pretentious), tense gameplay, and a pretty darn good narrative with strong theming. Super cool stuff, everybody. Even if you can't play it, I'd still recommend checking out an LP of it.
All I ever got from it was when I showed my cousin all he said was "its just a bioshock ripoff"
I remember having a blast with that game back in the day
I have literally spent all of yesterday losing my mind about the power of 2.5d shooters and here you are uploading the most sorcerous example. This is amazing.
"When they say destroy the sphinx they really mean the statue it burst out of" Dude the sphynx is a statute, not a strange dog-like mutant that likes to hide in cat-man statutes.
But the enemy is called Sphinx in the manual.
We really don't get quality Zardoz references anymore do we, but now, now we've got one
An alien species called the time strikers going through time to end humanity. I guess i now know where TimeSplitters got its premise idea.
Loved TimeSplitters, so it's really cool to know where it got it's inspiration from!
“While you were away on your mission, our base had been under attack 😮 We were able to withstand the attack but with great difficulty 😃 Unfortunately, there were casualties 😃 We lost the Commander 😔 This is a great loss for our platoon 😃 However, me must go on 😤” Wtf is the voice acting on this guy
I kind of want the answer to be he already sent future you to save him and is trying really really hard not to sound suspicious
Reminded me of how my dad told me about listening to Romanian radio back in his youth. The radio went something like this "In today's news: Following an incident, 3 people ended up dead, 6 ended up injured. And now, back to the music!"
Shit man, Doom might not have had rooms on top of rooms, but it had variable floor height, and walls angled in all sorts of ways. The way Chasm seems to happen all on the same floor and walls almost always in 90 degrees angles, it's basically more like Wolf3D on steroids that are also on steroids.
"You thought it was going to be a king of the hill joke" You got me there.
Bonifaciy is an actual name. it's not so bad, the "i"s are both pronounced as if in a closed syllable, like in "kiss", and that "c" really should have been a "tc", but that's about it.
The I in IY is pronounced the same as in WILL; and the Y the same as in DAY. Maybe it's not bad for Eastern Europeans, but it fucks up the Anglo speech apparatus really badly.
boney-facee
@@0ff868 bonny fatsy
@@valinhorn42 That's the one
Boney-Feces
Remembering playing the demo at the time, then the full game a year or two later... Such a good surprise ! Some details never seen, cool animations, enemies and weapons, all that we want in a nutshell. Oh, I when I saw the dismemberments... (I'm remembering now have changed the damage parameter in the ini file to be a little *powerful* ... result : huge dismemberment with fumes, so fun)
Chasm: The Rift was a great game for its day. Had a blast running this on a Pentium in a beige non-descript box.
The Picasso version of Steven Speilberg is my fave character
19:05 - 19:19 It's actually a little scary watching the polygons of his head as he idles, it looks the flesh on his head is bubbling around. Kind of looks like a PilotRedSun animation
You will regret that statement
I realised at exactly the same point you did in the video and had exactly the same reaction. The space odyssey mind warp effect captured it perfectly. What a hilarious twist.
Man, thanks for bringing back so many memories. All I remembered about this from back in the day was that it sort of looked like Quake run through the Build engine, you could blow heads off and you couldn't crouch.
My first thought when I saw this on my subscription feed was: "That son of a beehive finally did it...". I´ve been waiting for this for sometime now. Great work as always Civvie! I´m hoping you´ll do Powerslave: Exhume in the near future. Cheers!
I think kangaroo boy did it just awhile ago.
@@jothain literally who
@@jothain Who?
@@ghoulbuster1 Gamlives
@@jothain Gman has nothing on Civvie, though.
Those 3d character models are great. The attempts to recreate that effect in real 3d engines have never quite nailed it.
the effect of being muddy and uninteresting? why would anyone want to recreate that?
@@mrosskne But they are muddy and uninteresting in such a particular way... It's probably nostalgia more than anything, but that's art, it's not rational.
@@irritablerodent what particular way? be specific.
@@mrosskne Hey it's you again! You eating your veggies, champ? Growing kids need their vitamins.
"this is a great loss for our platoon" -said in the exact same cadence as the marketing lady trying to convince you to go to the optional employee picnic.
The double barreled shotgun's firing animation syncs with the end ROTT music holy cow.
I was checking out old Ross' and Civvie's videos longing for some new content, and 12 hours later you upload. Thanks for your work, Civvie!
A Double Dungeon Dipper like myself, nice.
Ross and Civvie make the most rewatchable videos.
@@alesin1992 Ross who? I'm hungry for new content
@@BeakerButch420 Ross Scott he runs the channel Accursed Farms. He's famous for his game dungeon series which is very similar to the type of videos that you would expect from Civvie11, or even to an extent Mandaloregaming/ Ssethtzeentach's video where he really gets into the weeds of usually some kind of obscure video game and makes a rather entertaining video about it. He also made the Freeman's mind series where he plays through half-life with a caricature of Gordon Freeman reacting to all the crazy stuff happening around him. Easily one of the best KZheadrs out there. Civvie11's channel was recommended to me because I watched Accursed Farms
@@testpleaseignore that's the best rundown of all those nice channels I follow. It would be even better if I didn't know them already ;___; Funnily enough I got from Ross to Civvie via the Sin review and I _think_ I heard about Sseth via Mandalore whom I in turn found in a totally unrelated discussion about good KZhead reviewers. Anyway, I hope your comment helps more people to those awesome channels.
The fact that the engine is 2D is more shocking than i thought...
I first found out about Chasm through ADGQ and was fascinated ever since. I also not only love how it's an obscure game from 1997 in a 2.5D engine that somehow has nicely animated skeletal models, but also how the smoke has real time distortion effects way before I'm sure that was a thing in 3D games.
Sat down to play this after watching, and got hit by extreme deja vu. Then it hit me! One of my favorite doom wads Strange Aeons borrows heavily from this game, textures, music, and even sfx like the double barrel shotgun.