Saving Private Ryan TC | SPR.GRP
Edge Designs
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| screenshot c/o ModDB. the rest are mine |
Movie-based game mods are nothing new. Aliens TC for Doom is one of the all-time classics. Walmart budget hits NAM and by extension its spiritual sequel WWII GI only even exist because of the developers' previous work on a Platoon conversion for Duke Nukem 3D. The legendary Neil Manke and his Black Widow Games outfit (you may know them for the classic Half-Life mod They Hunger) was actually commissioned by Sony Pictures Entertainment to create Underworld: Bloodline, a multiplayer Half-Life mod, as a promotional stunt for the first Underworld film. And one of the best mods for Duke Nukem 3D in the late 90s was based on Paul Verhoeven's cult classic film adaptation of Starship Troopers of all things. And then there's Saving Private Ryan TC.
Saving Private Ryan, the movie, is a landmark war film that changed how Hollywood made war movies, and inflamed the imaginations of game designers everywhere. Imagine storming Omaha Beach from the comfort of your own home; imagine fighting through the hedgerows. While WWII GI was the very first World War II-themed FPS that wasn’t Wolfenstein 3D with its abstract mazes and mad science, Saving Private Ryan TC, released a few months after WWII GI (and using some assets stolen from it,) was an attempt by a small group of Duke 3D fans under the name of Edge Designs to recreate their favorite war movie.
Let's just get this out of the way: Saving Private Ryan TC is just atrocious. It was heavily hyped at the time, seeing a lot of updates on the defunct Dukeworld which hosted the developers' page. (Dukeworld lives on again, now as a repository for Duke Nukem 3D maps and mods, sort of analogous to /idgames.) The main issue with the mod is that there’s simply no game here. Saving Private Ryan consists of a whopping five levels, each one representing key scenes from the Spielberg movie, from the infamous Omaha Beach sequence, to the ruined town (complete with spilled apple cart) to the radar bunker, the field where the squad is fired upon, and the big finale where they finally catch up with Ryan but he won't leave until the approaching enemy force is defeated. None of these levels have anything resembling good gameplay design. At best, they’re built around very small centerpieces, lifted from the movie, coming at the expense of gameplay. A good example would be the second level; aside from a few random soldiers, the key part of the map involves killing the sniper, which can be done in seconds. The levels are, in a word, ugly and simple, with little in the way of anything distinctive. The result of all this is that the game can be gotten through in about 15 minutes, with ten of those minutes spent on the awful first level. That's right bitches: Edge Designs looked at WWII GI and said "pfft, amateurs, we can make a worse Omaha Beach level than that."
There's just a few credits. Level design, at least according to an archived version of the team's website, is attributed to two people, Jeff (alias eXtreme-Rush) and Jody (alias kissle, who does not appear in the text file.) What assets weren't lifted from NAM, WWII GI or Platoon were modeled by foX and one Adam O'Hern. The code for Capture the Flag mode was authored by Conan. And that's it! The whole thing is clearly a labor of love from just a few people, but the end result is so underwhelming that I'm actually having to bullshit as much as I can to extend this review (which I originally wrote as part of a bigger article that mostly focused on WWII GI) into something longer than a few grumpy sentences.
It's obvious to me that Edge Designs really wanted to create a cinematic war experience, years before Call of Duty. But Build wasn't built for that; Build is barely suitable for regular shooting games, have you seen that thing's code? And so what we're left is a sort of art installation, a proof-of-concept for an idea that was more ambitious than the engine could manage, by people who were more interested in recreating specific scenes from a movie than creating an actual game. I mean, at least Duke Nukem 3D made a whole level out of the USS Enterprise. I just think, wouldn’t it have been more fun to simply mix the movie’s story beats into a broader game that more closely resembles WWII GI? Sometimes i wonder what happened to the mod team; it’s clear they were young when they made this (weren’t we all, back then…) I guess I admire what they were trying to do, and I appreciate that they were young and didn’t really think this through. But this whole thing is all flash and no thunder.
SPRL1: Ohmaha Beach
Yes, that’s how it’s spelled. It's basically a worse version of WWII GI's D-Day map, and can be done in a matter of seconds. Once you blow the shingle and get up onto the ridge it’s just Nazi city in the trenches beyond, and ammo is scarce – you’re better off just running towards the crater with the movie poster in it.
SPRL2: Vierville
A very short little jaunt through a war-torn village, with a squad of useless soldiers following you. The ruined applecart from the movie is here, as is the half-blown out house; a lone enemy up in a tower is easily dispatched, but figuring out how to get past the invisible wall blocking your further progress is tougher.
SPRL3: Bunker
Another short level, a charge up a hill with the enemy already firing at you. The bunker itself with the radar is cool-looking, at least.
SPRL4: The Fields
Basically “Bunker” but with tall, semi-transparent grass sprites everywhere. Kill all the Nazis and then go talk to the US soldiers hiding near the burning halftrack, and you’re on to the finale.
SPRL5: Last Battle
This is probably the closest this thing gets to a real level, and it sucks ass. You’ll not hurt for ammo, and health items actually show up here, but the place is teeming with enemy and cover is light. Get across the bridge and you’re done. Thank goodness!
-June<3
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