The golden era of PC gaming -- MDK, Fallout, Total Annhiliation, Starcraft, Diablo, Doom.



I have been told by my friends that I have gotten the completely wrong impression of MDK -- that it was a game meant to make fun of the other shooters that were being released at the time, and to shed light on the entire "dark space shooter" genre that many others have masterfully put on their belt: (See, DOOM, Abuse) but I could not help but remember the dark and truly amazing atmosphere and overall effect that this game had put upon me.

Playing at about 3 o' clock in the morning with the best pair of headphones a money could buy at that time...

From the very first moment of MDK you are gripped into a struggle that is much larger than life, much larger than a simple Janitor could ever possibly handle -- free falling from SPACE in an experimental coilsuit (If that sentence didn't make your jaw drop hearing it about a video game in 1997, you are impossible to impress) to board an alien minecrawler with almost no hope of success - being fired at by anti-aircraft guns, attempting to avoid their radar systems, dodging missiles, all the while the giant resource processing turbines on the Minecrawler destroy a cityblock per second and thousands of lives are lost per second. The sense of time seems to elude you when you actually land on the Minecrawler - but simply watching the landscape evaporate beneath you those first few seconds is a cold shiver that no human being can deny -- a much more painful and menacing death than nuclear war. The only other time I've felt such hate for an alien race was when I saw the dismounted human living carcasses attached to the walls in Quake 4, and the Strogg were using their bodies as human pumping stations -- with the throat holes making desperate squirting noises -- unable to scream for help or scream out in pain. You simply HAD to kill the bastards behind all of this.

Kurt eventually leads his path along the surface of the Minecrawler where he is put up against an impossible scenario - thousands of aliens are in his path between the controller and salvation, as well as the fact that you have to fight airdropped TANKS. Here, the musical score is also quite superb -- "Stranger Things" is someone can immediately recognize, no matter who - if they've played MDK at least once, they know what it is. Highjacking an aircraft, and using it against the aliens to bomb their own structures (Again, who would've heard of such in games back then, much less be able to pull it off?)

Reaching the Overseer's Lair, we are presented with a large infinite planescape, with white foggy mist below us, and a tower reaching a mile high, with a single reptilian at the Minecrawler's controls. Behind him, you can see the city being devoured by the massive powerful industrial resource harvesting grinders. You snap off the attachment from your forearm and connect it to your head, the screen slowly flicks on and you zoom in with a whirr, seeing the red in the Reptilian Overlord's eyes. "I've got you, you bastard -- here's one bullet for each of the six hundred thousand dead."

It is scenes like this that leave the impressions upon the mind of the deep, dark, and staggering atmosphere.



3D Reflective Surfaces. The next time I saw that was in Deus Ex, released in 2000 - three years later, but on the Unreal Engine. This was still DOS. Without hardware rendering. Even now, I've not yet seen crystalline infrastructure in games that resembled anything to that level of beauty -- the closest I've seen were the alien tunnels in the original Crysis, but nothing like this. Yes, I know the screenshot may look like nothing to slobber over now, but remember the conditions - high end PC, 3 AM, high quality headphones, total privacy, 1997.

In conclusion, MDK is bar none of the best and most innovative shooting video games I have ever played, and am shocked that not another company has ever come close to re-creating the gameplay experience, or atmosphere level of this beautiful game. I've played MDK2.. and.. yeah. Monolithian Black Stone and Granite. The atmosphere is totally lacking.

Shiny and gamesas really outdid themselves with this game; the amount of creativity, concept art, and ideas before it came to fruition must've been absolutely staggering, I could imagine an entire ROOM full of illustrations for the inital helmet design, world design, suit design, and such.

On a good day, only six million people will die.

But then gamesas goes ahead and releases another title in November that goes by the name of Fallout... and obliterates my entire understanding of "CRPG"...

(I'd write more but I don't think my hands can simply handle it anymore -- there's far too much to be said and not enough time.)

Outstanding game and highly underrated. I really feel sorry for anyone who never played this gem.

MDK 2 for the Dreamcast was one that I played the hell out of. gamesas has yet to release both of them for Xbox Live Arcade though...and I don't really have a PC. Quality over quantity, but don't make something so highly qualified that it doesn't exist right? 'Cmon gamesas. Let's put SOMETHING out!

DarkLegacy - that was incredible. Really, really well written - you reflected all my thoughts about this game (and the second). I desperately want to see the incredibleness and epicness of the first game put (and improved upon) into a next-gen MDK 3.