Black Box

The Low-End Mac Portable Gaming Page

WOLFENSTEIN 3D

The year was 1993. Intel 80386 was the helluva chip, used only in the high-end, pro workstations. Apple was knee-deep in troubles (as usual): Michael Spindler replaced John Sculley, who turned out to be a disaster as CEO; soon Spindler will be replaced by Amelio, who will put a new definition of a really disasterous disaster, but in a galaxy far away from Cupertino ingenious John McCarmack understood that the power of the latest 386 chips finally allows coders to write a game set in true 3D environment. Thus Wolfenstein3D was born. It was set in a flat (no stairs, no ledges) maze of corridors with no ceilings or floors. But hey, this was some totally new quality in games! Without this game, there would be no Doom nor Quake (as there would be no IdSoft). Soon (in 1994) Mac version appeared. The first PowerMacs were being shipped, so luckily Mac Wolfie has a FAT-binary structure and runs like a charm on modern G3s and G4s and even Powerbook 1400's. But the developer - MacPlay - suggested '68030 25MHz for decent speed'.

OVERALL RATING: Graphics is crude - but still nice. Playable even today!

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Any color Mac with 4 megabytes RAM (68030 recommended). 8 megabytes recommended.

CD-ROM: Science-fiction in 1993

SCREEN: 640*480 is the maximum resolution; respects system settings for brightness and contrast

SLEEP: Compatible

KEYBOARD/TRACKPAD: Customizable; MacPlay was kind enough to provide special PowerBook settings (used in later Mac 3D games)

BUGS: None detected; the game is pretty well coded if it survives transition to G3 on OS 9.x.

MORE INFO/PURCHASE OPTIONS: I doubt if anyone could actually purchase it today; there is a guy at http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/1568/wolf.html who keeps developing custom levels


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