ERADICATOR IS WEIRD AND CRUNCHY DOS JANK

[AI VOICE] The prisoner has an uneasy sleep, full of terrible dreams, brought on by consumption of under-cooked meat packaged into a loaf by his captors and it is here that he sees the king. [CV-18] Blessed be these halls! [CIVVIE] What year is it? Can I make fun of the president? There's something wrong with his brain. [CV-18] He lives! [CIVVIE] Where is this? [CV-18] HE LIVES! [CIVVIE] 18?! [CV-18] Prepare for his return! Glory to the King! [CIVVIE] Oh my god, why is it sticky?! *funky music*

People have recommended this game to me. It's obviously an FPS game, look, see? It's got all kinds of shooting and things over here. It was developed by Accolade, a company famous for me confusing them with Acclaim and also their revolutionary mascot platformer, Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind. [BUBSY] What could possibly go wrong?! *whirling noise* *gurgled screaming* [CIVVIE] This would be the only FPS game developed in-house at Accolade. Accolade was then bought by Infogrames whi

ch bought Atari so then they rebranded to Atari SA, and then a bunch of their properties got scattered to the wind in a lot of corporate restructuring and bankruptcies… -a lot of these corporate stories are copied and pasted, whole buyouts, acquisitions, so it gets a little confusing - So then Eradicator, along with the lucrative Bubsy the Bobcat franchise, gets bought by Tommo, but the store page says Atari and Nightdive Studios, that's right, we have another Nightdive release except this isn't

a port, because this game runs on DOS on some fucking indiscernible game engine, but Atari re-acquired the Accolade properties, but also Nightdive, but it isn't Atari anymore, it's the company wearing the face of Atari, which was Infogrames, which was founded by Bruno Bonnell, who hosted the French version of The Apprentice, and I can't discern what is important and not important among this tornado of fucking bullshi- *Deep Into the Code from Doom* I don't know what engine this game runs on bec

ause it doesn't say. It looks a lot like the Build engine because it has sort of 3D-ish environments, some of which look closer to the Jedi engine used for Outlaws and Dark Forces, but like… I booted up the level editor to try and get some clues but I pressed "Q" and it suddenly closed, I guess that's the quit button. It just looks like it crashed. I can't figure out how I'm supposed to draw anything in this editor. And that's okay! We don't need to learn how this weird thing works because there

's an option to import a Doom map in Doom, Heretic, or HeXen format! I have to press Insert to add a vertex and then turn that into a line and then turn those into sectors, and like… okay, let me see the help section. You know what nevermind - *tension music* In the far future, the occupants of the galaxy depend on Mazrium, which is described in the manual as "the basis for all current technologies and power sources" and also it has "life-giving properties". It can only be found on the three moo

ns of the planet Ioxia. [REPORTER] Abort Mazrium ore pickup! The Citadel has come alive! It's attacked the mines! Our satellite picked up this message! [G'OR] Our defensive… begins the… shall no longer be… by those whose flesh… [CIVVIE] That lovely alien gentleman is Gor. I'm sorry, he has an apostrophe in his name, I mean "GUH OR". He's using some kind of energy web… [REPORTER] The moons are surrounded! Rescue ships can't get through! Everyone is dying! [G'OR] Mazrium ore shall not leave Ioxia'

s moons. Any bleeding flesh that enters the Citadel will be killed and thrown into tissue vats for re-use. G'or has spoken! [REPORTER] That's the latest message from the Citadel. Stay away! The energy web is coming right toward our location! Please, please, do not approach Ioxia! *alarm siren* [CIVVIE] Ah, yes, the Universal Mining Guild, they seem trustworthy, I can't imagine why anyone would disobey those orders except for one of the three characters you play as in this game. So yeah, starting

a war with a hostile force on their own turf in order to continue extracting valuable resources, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?! There are actually four characters, because you get an extra one once you beat the game, but that's not important right now. I played through the game as Dan Blaze, cybernetic mining engineer, but I could have chosen the mercenary Eleena, who is faster and less powerful, and a cat-girl… She's a mercenary hired by UMG, Universal Mining Guild, not Universal Music Group,

although I expect Universal Music Group would hire someone to do extreme violence against you if you threatened their bottom line. If you don't believe me, talk some shit about Taylor Swift. Weirdly, each character has a different introductory level. Eleena crash landed on this planet. [ELEENA] Looks like I'll be adding the cost of a new ship to my price tag. [CIVVIE] You guys like this delicious, crispy 320x240 resolution? Hell yeah, I knew you would! Each character also gets different starting

weapons. Eleena has these claws and the ripper disc. I don't think there's anything particularly interesting about how these weapons function compared to the ones other characters have. [ELEENA] This sludge looks pretty nasty! [CIVVIE] That was fast. [ELEENA] Taken out one satellite, anyway. [CIVVIE] My objective was to access the Citadel through the ducts and also destroy that satellite, those being the only mission objectives exclusive to Eleena. I fired up the campaign with all the character

s, playing their intro levels and getting a sense of each one's personality. Next up is Kamchak, Treyoan warrior, sent to Ioxia to kill shit good. [KAMCHAK] The clan of Treyoan shall be made proud today! [CIVVIE] Yeah, he's one of those warrior race guys. He has a photon pulse and also claws. He has to find the same kind of entrance to the Citadel, disengage the security system, and now that I'm looking at this map here : this is really, really Build-engine like. The automap showing textured flo

ors and white outlines is also very Build engine. [KAMCHAK] A tunnel into the Citadel! [CIVVIE] Everyone enters a tunnel to the Citadel and comes out right here. Except the final character you get after beating the game, the Alliance Commando, who skips right to the Citadel Entrance level. I think he's shooting the same balls as Kamchak. So then there's the character I played most of the game as, Dan Blaze, because this is a 90's shooter god damn it, and that's the name of a 90's shooter protago

nist! I assume it was also changed from Blazkowicz like Billy's was. He is a cybernetic mining engineer who was caught in the scary green web and unlike the other characters, he isn't supposed to be here so I figured I could relate to this character the most. He's on one of the moons at a mining installation. [DAN BLAZE] Woah! The mine got hit by some kind of energy wave! [CIVVIE] And what a dumbass I am for picking this character because his intro level is easily the hardest. I have to turn the

generator on because I haven't turned the game's brightness up yet so you kids can't see anything. I find that this mission teaches me a lot of the weirder features of this game, like the picture-in-picture security cameras and how you don't pick up weapons, you pick up ammo, which your Cynetics model XG9101 Multi-cannon can use. Here, we pick up some mines, which aren't really that useful to me but okay. If you take a look down here on the HUD, you can see that they fill up slot 8. There are 1

5 weapon slots because this game has dozens of weapons, which is way too many and a lot of them are novelty weapons. We'll get into those in a bit since I only find a couple in this level. I have to navigate this base, find the control room, jam the scanners so that you don't get shot down trying to get to Ioxia, and run to the launch bay to a shuttle within 60 seconds. Luckily, the game gives you a little text to tell you where you are… in this level. It's so strange that this intro level is so

involved when it comes to interactivity while the others are straightforward with minimal switch-hunting and shooting. Maybe that's why Dan Blaze is on the game's box art. Once you finish a level, there's a weird, bouncy fly-by of the stage with the stats screen and pay attention to that bit at the bottom where it says "keycard found". That's gonna be a pain later. As for "Destruction Total", I have no idea what that means and the manual won't tell me. So now that we're finally into the main ca

mpaign: *quiet action music* After a kinda Doom-like intermission screen showing us where we are in the complex, it's time to really start taking it to the Strogg. I mean, they're not Strogg but they're cybernetic abominations. While using the "Sonic Shock" weapon, the game's shotgun, I pick up- Oooh, look at him, Li'l Buddy! This guy, and his big brother I find later, bob at the side of the screen and provide another projectile whenever you fire and I really like that idea. You can even have a

couple of them at once. I said before that there are like two dozen weapons, or as the game says : "twice as many weapons as other games", and that philosophy also applies to your inventory and power-ups. In the first level alone, you get a weapon enhancement chip which I think just adds an extra projectile, and on-demand cover. In the next level, you'll find invulnerability, low-gravity boots, radar tracking, the adrenaline catalyst, which is Duke3D's steroids, invisibility, a power-up that let

s you drain health from bodies by collecting their souls, you know, a thing that cybernetic organisms have and that absolutely belongs in our sci-fi shooter, anything goes! This game throws everything it can at the wall to see what sticks. The death dart gun? Sticks. My favorite weapon. Adds a little spice to the average pew-pewiness of most energy weapons and has just the best rhythm and a really satisfying damage output. The flamethrower? Does not stick. It is basically a melee weapon, yet it

occupies slot 10 in your loadout like it's an important gun. Sure, it stunlocks, if you're six inches away from an enemy and that enemy is also a little stupid. You want a standard missile launcher on slot 5, well, you got one, and if i had the picture-in-picture open, you could see that they put a camera on it too. Also useful for when you get stuck in geometry in this weird jank-ass game. The weapon on slot 6, the pellet bomb, looks more useful than it is. The damage feels pretty inconsistent

when you're not using it on the lowest of low-tier enemies. I also hold a grudge against it, personally, because it's making me write more in this script about the weapons, which is already gonna be a lot because it has TWICE AS MANY WEAPONS AS OTHER GAMES! Yeah, well, you don't get the pellet bomb as Kamchak! He gets cluster bombs! That's…. fine, whatever, but he also gets an alternate slot 7 weapon and a different flamethrower that seems functionally identical… but the fire is green? How many

weapons do you need, Eradicator? Are you proto-Borderlands? Eleventy billion guns but a lot of them aren't really practical or noticeably different? Because this cluster bomb doesn't seem a whole lot different than the Ion Sphere! You've got too many weapons, Eradicator, and too many of them are just gimmick weapons that aren't as useful as death darts. The map screen will tell you all your objectives which are usually to destroy a thing and solve a puzzle. Not a HeXen puzzle, thankfully, becaus

e you usually don't have to travel across the world to hit all the switches. In level 2, you have to hit switches and shoot a thing. In level 3, you have to shoot 3 things that control force fields, but you have to do it across the map in less than a minute or else repair droids will fix them and you'll have to wait and do that again, which isn't frustrating now, but when they re-use the mechanic later in the game in a much less straight- forwardly designed level, oh yeah, it gets ugly. You wann

a shoot the repair droids? Fine, but I have yet to actually kill one. You might notice the slightly weird, Metroid-ass health system we have here. No numbers, no percentages, one bar that changes from full blue, yellow and red. I wouldn't say that this game is really difficult on the Normal skill. It has its moments later on, which we'll talk about, but for right now there's so many pickups that refill all of your health and so many enemies that only fire little projectiles that you can easily d

odge. So, yeah, running around and shooting three generators before the time runs out. You don't have a timer, this is old-school, you need to count that shit down yourself like I did. And now I get to the end of level 3 and guess what? Insufficient keycards gathered, because I haven't found any. I haven't been secret hunting hard enough. Nearly every level has a secret keycard in it and in Episode 1, I need three of them to get to the secret level. In episode 2, I need 4. In episode 3? That's r

ight, I need fucking five of them. And finding these keycards isn't always very easy. The first one I found in episode 2, I was only able to find because I stumbled onto it while I was trying to platform, badly, I might add, because the movement is so slippery that platforming sucks, and yeah, it's right here, and it rotates so it's basically invisible about a third of the time. But don't you worry, people going into the comments to tell me what a hack I am for not playing the Episode 1 secret l

evel, I went back when I was getting footage for Kamchak and played through the episode again so I could find all of those keycards! I had to push an explosive barrel over here to jump onto it to get to this exploded bit of wall. As for the secret level, don't get me wrong, I'd be shocked by this room-over-room trickery back then, maybe, because I was like 8 years old and I'm not sure how much that would have registered and I probably would have already put this game down because it had puzzles.

So, yeah, secret level, it's five minutes long and not a lot different from the other levels. No re-creations of Pac-Man here. So after you finish the secret level, you got two more maps in the episode including a boss level. Not only does it have a boss, but it lets me show you one of the other things people like to advertise about this game, which is the ability to remote control some of the cyborgs to solve puzzles. Okay, so when I say puzzle, I still mean… Wait a minute… "There's a slight d

raft behind you"- OH FUCK YOU, GAME! That's dirty. This was done earlier too. You can take control of a variety of bots, right, and this one in level before, Biogen Reclamation… [DAN BLAZE] Hmm… acid. Maybe I can put a droid through that too! [CIVVIE] I don't care if it's acid, it's brown and I have to wade through it. We're not even getting started. The first boss is a horny tank. Look at him. He's a tank, he has horns, he spams you with explosives, and I think "man I should re-stock my health"

. Which I do. In the middle of the battle because I still have access to the rest of the level. [DAN BLAZE] Yeah! [CIVVIE] That's a good boss explosion, Eradicator. This is where I found out I had the "soul capture" power-up which kept telling me to use it near a corpse, it just turned out that the first corpse I came across was the boss. Soul capture completely drained and refilled my health. Onto the next episode, where I can hopefully do better and find some keycards. Imagine playing a 90's F

PS and having the most trouble finding keycards. *sci-fi ambient music* I feel like I'm underselling how weird this game is. The levels themselves break from the tradition of FPS games of the time by not getting much more complicated as they go along. A couple are pretty lengthy with a lot of moving parts, but most of them are straightforward and if they're not, they're still short. This one tries to have a gimmick where you use your remote controlled car bombs, right. Okay, well, that's not hel

pful. Wait a minute, "evil li'l buddy"? Thankfully, you can double-tap the number key to select the higher tier weapons, like I have to press 2 twice to select these except it uses the same sprite as my number 2 weapon so, you know, that's shitty, I'm just a little confused here as to why my li'l buddy is evil? Is it Max? "You tagged yourself with the evil Li'l buddy! "Pick up health to lose the tag." Are you fucking serious?! That's not buddy behavior! Oh wait, there's health right there! No! [

SAM] You crack me up, little buddy! [CIVVIE] Not nearly as fun as the boomerang. And that's not even close to as fun as the death bomb, the smoke bomb, the biohacker, the Arachnicator, the mini-mech, the gas-blower, the death sphere or the spike-thrower. I made up half of those weapons and you can't even guess which ones. You have too many guns, Eradicator! And the ones you have aren't particularly satisfying. The shotgun-ish weapon is fine but it doesn't have that- FUCK! This game needed explod

ing enemies that bounce around because the DOS-era mouse look is just shitty enough for it to be a real problem. Most levels last as long as it takes for me to find the secret keycard. This one in F2 - that's Factory 2 - is behind a wall you have to shoot. Not with an explosive, this isn't the Build engine, even though it's very, very similar, but you'll notice I'm blowing up a flat wall here instead of anything solid like you would in Duke3D so my theory is that they saw what Duke3D was doing a

nd said, "Yeah, we can do that too!" and then they added this. They added everything. Normally, when you try to add everything your contemporaries are doing, you spend 12 years on a game until your studio goes bankrupt. The next level is tiny and built around a switch puzzle that you have to solve to get the location of that precious Mazrium ore on the moons. After the first round of switches, you have to find and hit some slightly more vaguely defined switches. This map is really tiny and inter

connected. I bet it'd make a killer Deathmatch arena. Speaking of that Mazrium ore, you get to actually see some of it in the next level because you have to blow it up. I'm gonna wish I'd died because despite blowing up their supply of Mazrium, their Mazrium grinders are still working, and I have to shut four of those off before repair droids can fix them, and that looks like it's just un-pushing the buttons I pushed. If I wanted to find the most efficient route through this level, I'd be a spee

drunner. Sometimes I forget that I paid money for this game because it feels like abandonware, right? It feels like it's some weird European FPS knock-off from like 1997, but no, this was made in the USA in 1996 and it is currently for sale on Steam and GOG. For less than half a Perilous Warp! And it's not that janky. Like it has some totally invisible options in the sound menu for some reason but what game doesn't?! Did I say shut off four grinders? Yeah, hit four switches, but it's actually fi

ve, because there's also a master switch. After that, I'm off to the next secret level because I sure as shit didn't miss the keycards after finding out what they do. I'd never live it down, like crouching under the tentacle in Doom 3. It would go on my tombstone. [DAN BLAZE] That part of the factory is abandoned. [CIVVIE] Oh, yeah, so I'm not gonna open the door and have to kill something? Yeah, that's what I thought. A tiny bonus level that doesn't really give you anything special. Hit a coupl

e switches and exit to easily the most confusing level in the game. We're talking HeXen levels of jumping through teleporters, not knowing where they end up and only really under- standing how to get out looking through every single little corner of the map. And then I get to the end and it's like : "All objectives must be completed before"… Oh god damn it! I forgot to hit one switch and I have to search high and low for it. Now I get to fight the episode 2 boss and the supporting enemies here a

re way worse and shoot explosives everywhere. They're gonna show up a lot going forward in the last episode so let's just enjoy humiliating this clown of a boss. [DAN BLAZE] Hey, the lights! Yeah, I got him! Ha ha, I got him! [CIVVIE] Yeah, nice and easy. *tension rap music* *MK2 - Evil Streets* We're in the final stretch, kids, and let me tell you, they've saved the very best for last… Really? Oh god… Is it every level? STOP! Jesus! The first couple levels of this section, which is supposed to

be like another factory except they make horrible cybernetic clone monsters here, I mean look at it, it has all the hallmarks of sewers, and I know I keep banging this drum, and I know some of you are tired of it and trust me, I don't enjoy having to go back to the previous video every single time to make sure the count is accurate when it's clear that I don't even really care that much if the count is accurate, but if it ends up being wrong, bad things happen, this is all your fault, you wouldn

't let it die, I wanted it to die but I can't now, oh god I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, two to the count, two to the desk… *Super Mario Bros. 3 Sky Land Theme* This is where they're making all the enemies I'm fighting. I would have thought it would be in the factory but it's not, it's down here, in the Biogen Aqueduct. You would think that one exploding kamikaze enemy was enough since they don't really do anything but move and explode but that's the attitude of someone who isn't trying to throw way t

oo much shit into their weird DOS shooter. I guess this one is smaller and faster. These other things here, I don't have names for them, the manual tells you very little about the game's weapons, enemies, like did you know that Kamchak has his own language? [reading] Which translates to : [reading] Certainly a sentence that can't be misinterpreted. I can't make a sexual joke out of that and I'm sure the use of the word "Ackbar" by a bunch of nerds who made a sci-fi video game in 1996 means nothi

ng, I'm moving on. *comical music* Speaking of stupid Star Wars shit, these enemies that I was gonna start talking about like half an hour ago. Yeah, so these things remind me a lot of the dianogas from Dark Forces. Because they act exactly the same way. I have a save game in the Force engine just for the purposes of referring back to that level because I have to frequently enough! There are so many of them swimming around in this precious bio-sludge that G'or is using in the production of this

cyborg army, that I assumed they spawned whenever the texture for this green crap appeared. They're weird and glitchy sometimes and I hate them so much and just when you think you've killed all of them, one more pops up! What the fuck? Okay. In fact, all of the enemies in this final episode are more obnoxious than difficult. Here's a tip from a professional YouTube Content Monkey : always pause your game when taking notes. [DOAKES] Surprise, motherfucker! [CIVVIE] It's novel to be able to shoot

and destroy wall turrets that shoot grenades or fire instead of what usually happens in games which is that it's an environmental hazard that's permanent. Still, wall turrets that spit out grenades while I'm trying to platform over this nonsense? Yeah. The higher-tier monsters tend to shoot explosives. Take a look at this guy, right here, who we saw before with the episode 2 boss. Now he's back in this level, the Soul Cages. I really don't like the implication that these bio-mechanical horrors h

ave souls because that means they have some kind of moral or ethical concerns about preventing the Universal Mining Guild from getting all the Mazrium. Give me the fucking Mazrium, okay? Papa needs a new pair of Ferraris! And it makes me feel a little bad about trying to kill them until this happens. This motherfucker shoots land mines everywhere. Don't worry, there's only three of them in this room. And then three more in this room… Here, have an explosive hover-drone. What the fuck?! The absol

ute peak of this game's dickish placement of these things comes in the fifth Biogen level, Biogen Processing… [DAN BLAZE] Uh oh! [CIVVIE] This game isn't even that hard most of the time. I found an enemy the flamethrower is good for! I also hate these guys too but at least they drop death dart ammo. I feel a little bad about making fun of them because they kept shooting over my head one time… That's embarrassing. I can kinda see why this game wasn't a huge hit that people remember despite being

released by a… reputable studio… [BUBSY, distorted] What could possibly go wrong? [CIVVIE] You know the studio that developed Bubsy 3D did pretty well, right? They went on to become a first party developer for Sony. They made the Syphon Filter games! And Days Gone! And Columbo's Mystery Capers for the Apple Newton! Wait, the what? So, yeah, I can kind of see it, because this game came out for DOS in October of 1996, you know, four months after Quake. It must have been pretty demoralizing to work

on this weird pseudo-3D game with some impressive technology like 8-player deathmatch but it couldn't attract their core audience away from Quake deathmatches against 15 other people. I haven't played Eradicator deathmatch but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it probably isn't as fun as Quake deathmatch. Please send your complaints about my uninformed opinion to Katie. So anyway I go through these nightmare sewers and find every bonus level keycard and- [DAN BLAZE] Nobody's been here in a whi

le. [CIVVIE] Don't you fucking do that to me again, Dan Blaze. This is the only bonus level so far that feels special. Because it's more explode-y. [DAN BLAZE] At least I can blow up these power cons! [CIVVIE] Yeah, I need to find three of them and - "One third of the exit is open." What is this HeXenry!? I don't recall seeing these items before in this game at any point, and I could be totally wrong about that but should I have known not to shoot them? The second-to-last level, I felt like I se

quence-broke by using the low-grav boots for this jump here but I was pretty tired of the bio-labs. The levels in this game may be small but the bio-labs are pretty similar and there's more of them than any other. There are seven of these and two of them are, as far as I'm concerned, sewers. So I ride a platform to a teleporter and go to the final level, The Core, where I have to defeat G'or. [DAN BLAZE] It's him! G'or! [CIVVIE] I always try to melee a boss for shits and giggles and this is usua

lly how it goes down. Okay, but the second time I actually try. I run into the arena, throw a couple cute little sprinkler turrets down, hit him with a death sphere which is… self-explanatory. It's a powerful weapon that insta-kills smaller monsters. I'm over-equipped to deal with him. It's not like he covers the floor in land mines. HEY! Respect the man! Put that apostrophe back in his name. Hey wait, it looks like there's a whole arena here- [DAN BLAZE] The whole place is blowing to pieces! [C

IVVIE] Yeah? We gonna open sometime or do I just die now? [DAN BLAZE] Hope this takes me out of here! [CIVVIE, reading] See that? That's DOS! The game not only ended, it exited the program to show us this. We've unlocked the final character too. I thought this game had crashed because DOSBox is set to close when a game exits so I didn't even get to read this the first time through because I got kicked back to the desktop. It just looks like it cra- #@////Fx1%se](" *end credits*