#studio 3do

Strife

On June 17th, 2000, Deus Ex was released and changed the gaming landscape. It merged first person shooting mechanics with RPG elements, creating a new type of game called an “immersive sim,” built from the early work of the System Shock series. It was designed to allow players to think and experiment with how to use the game systems in inventive new ways, taking two genres that shouldn’t function together at all and finding magic with them mixed. The funny thing is that Deus Ex may have finally established what had been building since 1994, but its unique blend of shooter and role playing had already been tried once before. Rogue Entertainment’s Strife, released in 1996, tried to do a lot of what Deus Ex accomplished on the DOOM engine (the id Tech 1, to be precise, and the last official released game made with it), and it actually had a fair bit of success. It’s nowhere near as good as arguably one of the best games ever made, of course, but it’s kind of amazing just how forward thinking it is in so many ways. 

Twisted - The Game Show Club 3DO: Station Invasion Zhadnost: The People’s Party

As one can gather from the title, Twisted: The Game Show is a game show set in the world of television. Not a game about a television studio, or the people who work for it, to be clear; the game is set in a little world behind the TV known as the Palindrome, which the six playable characters are all vying to escape from, probably because the place looks like some sort of surreal cross between the Red Room from Twin Peaks and the colorful geometric shapes that defined the early ‘90s aesthetic. Also present, but not playable, are Twink Fizzdale, the host of the game, and his assistant Hannah, who doesn’t do much besides make wacky hand gestures as various events in the game occur.