If gaming innovation is what you crave, look no further than the independent developer. While larger game companies rarely venture off the beaten path and continue to give us the same kinds of games year in and year out, it’s the independent developers that are admired for bringing new, daring, and innovative ideas to the table. Look no further than games like Façade, Alien Hominid, or Crimsonland to push the envelope for innovation and offer a level of addictiveness that the folks at Blizzard could only wish to achieve. These developers rarely ask for much as their games are free, or at least affordable enough that no one would mind kicking a little bit of cash their way. It’s another thing when some kid in his parents’ basement develops an uninspired and broken knockoff running on a dated and 3D engine while attempting to drum up controversy to get his game noticed – all at the low, low price of twenty-five bucks. Sound unreal? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Gore Galore.
Released in 1995 by the not-so-infamous Jester Software, Gore Galore made the rounds on BBS’s through the then cutting-edge medium of Shareware CD-ROMs. The game’s description, prefaced with the term “violent game”, made no attempt to downplay any violence and promised to “satisfy your sickest fantasies in a splatter fest of blood and gore. Run amouk [sic], and enter the dark side of the human mind…” While the game wasn’t anything close to a splatter fest, it did make good on the promise satisfying your sickest fantasies, that is, if your fantasies include burying Hank Williams Jr. in a pile of feces. Right now, I can almost hear the collective eyebrows of Germany all rising at once.
Pre-dating the Postal Dude by a couple of years, Gore Galore puts you into the shoes of one Bloody Bob, depicted above. He's a man who enjoys the simple things in life - like carrying heads and smuggling whole hams in his pockets. As you can tell by the title screen, the art direction here is hilarious. Once you get past the title screen, the Jester Software propaganda starts up through a series of SIX, count ‘em, SIX nag screens in a vain attempt to make you shell out your hard-earned cash for this game. To add extra incentive, Jester Software was even offering their other super smash hit, Billy Bob Bond absolutely free with registration of Gore Galore. If there’s one thing that TV has taught me over my twenty-something years here on earth, it would be “they’re giving it away for FREE? It must be good!”
After you get a chance to chuckle at the game’s garish main menu, you’ll find yourself immersed in the persistent world of Gore Galore. Bloody Bob finds himself
Doors to nowhere are the least of your trouble..
imprisoned by Ninjas and makes a break for it after knocking one of them out with his dreaded Ninja kick. Upon venturing out of your cell, you’ll quickly realize that you might want to go back in. The world outside is cruel, ugly, and doesn’t seem to go beyond displaying three textures at a time. You’ll frequently find yourself getting stuck in corners or in the occasional “decorations” that randomly lie around. The game does an excellent job of muddling your mind by making every hallway and room look exactly the same. Going around in circles for thirty minutes while trying to get your bearings makes Gore Galore much less a splatterfest than the perfect hall of mirrors simulator. The level design is truly fitting of the work of those geniuses depicted in those Collins / Westwood college commercials they play on G4 all the time.
While the level design is maddening, the combat is just broken. Your default machine gun fires at the rate of one round a second and is incapable of hitting anything within ten feet of it, thus forcing you to run right up to enemies and shoot them point-blank which even then carries mixed results. Good thing the AI backing the baddies you encounter is dumber than that kid from the special ed class that played with drool-soaked baby toys in middle school. Oftentimes, you can walk right up to them without being noticed, other times; they’ll be able to spot you well beyond the three-foot draw distance the game engine is capable of. You’ll do battle with a
Yay...we're...outside.
variety of three palette-swapped enemies that all look and act the same. In addition to the aforementioned Ninjas, you’ll also fight guys in green uniforms that strangely resemble Hank Williams Jr. and Maytag repairmen donned in blue jumpsuits. While you’ll be hard-pressed to let go of your undependable machine gun, you’ll eventually come across other fine firearms such as a rocket launcher, a fire extinguisher, grenades, and a shotgun. Setting itself apart from the rest of your weapons is what could only be considered the most inspired weapon of all time – the poo gun, which acts as a hose allowing you to spray gobs of semi-liquefied shit to bury your enemies under. Sure, the game may call it the “goo gun”, but the game’s documentation explicitly refers to it as the poo gun. Considering the glowing intellect this game shows in its first ten levels, I’d be so bold to say that it wasn’t a typo. Nearly all of the weapons are useless. You learn to use the sorry machine gun out of necessity, ammo for the poo gun is only available in a couple of levels, and grenades can only be thrown a couple of feet and fail to kill anything let alone the dimwitted AI. The shotgun is about the only useful weapon since it has the ability to kill anything beyond a five-foot radius, which, totally goes against the conventional laws of firearms. Then again, I’m trying to derive realism from a game with a poo gun and the art style of a ten-year-old – my bad.
See how useless your weapons and the AI really are.
The Maytag man takes a pop-shot.
A rudimentary and broken inventory system crushes any remaining potential this game has. You can pick items up by pressing the I button on the keyboard. When you need them, you can hit the S key to cycle through your inventory and drop an item on the ground for you to pick up. The problem is that half of the items that you drop, aside from health kits, aren’t recognized by the game. You’ll encounter armor pickups that do nothing for you, things that look like diving helmets, grenades with satellite dishes on them, and other oddities that seem to do nothing for you. You’ll also notice that oftentimes you’ll walk over ammo, but it’ll fail to give you more bullets – as if it’s some sort of cruel joke or simply just a mirage.
Throughout the game, you’ll be bombarded with propaganda begging you to buy this crap. Every level has a handful of walls reminding you not to forget to register the game. You’ll also pick up pieces of paper nagging you to pay your hard-earned money to what could possibly be the laziest game developer in existence. I’m sorry, but I refuse to give my money to someone who calls me a loser.
If my words and the screenshots failed to put the point across, let me just say the game is as ugly as sin. There are only five to seven textures throughout the entire game. Enemy animation is bad, as is expected by just taking a glance at the images. The advertised blood and gore really amount to nothing more than some poorly drawn blood on two of the three frames of enemy death animations, which are all the same no matter what you hit them with whether it’s a bullet, rocket, or grenade. If you thought this game looked ugly on the inside, just wait until Bloody Bob makes his way outside. Nestled against a backdrop of what looks like a grainy, pixilated design from a corner-bought velvet painting, the world sprawls out before you until it hits a big brick wall twenty feet away. Foliage and water look like something out of a beginner’s MS Paint class at some small-town community college. However, these little anomalies all look professional compared to this travesty:
This is your character’s HUD, which displays your health. While it looks laughable right off the bat, you’ll get crayon scribbles of red on it as you get injured. As your health whittles down, your flesh will become bones until you turn into a hilarious looking skeleton. The cherry to this proverbial crap sundae, however, has to be the victory screen you receive at the end of the demo that looks like nothing more than a ripped-off magazine car ad with Bloody Bob’s smiling mug pasted into the windshield.
The sound mimics the quality brought forth by the visuals. Your enemies will spout three random sayings like “hey”, “over there”, or the instant classic “HALT SO I CAN SHOOT YOU” that sounds like it was slowed down to half speed. The gun noises are also unimpressive and you don’t get any noises when you walk over items. Really, the lame sound bytes, gun noises, doors, and three music tracks are all that make up the sound portion of the game.
A food court...in prison!
It really took balls to release a DOS-only game in 1995 that really amounted to nothing more than a poor man’s Wolfenstein with a price tag of $25. This game was just plain awful, and the developers most likely knew that or else they would have let the game speak for itself rather than try to stir up their own manufactured controversy over it with an embellished game description and self-serving mature rating. The levels were a mess, the visuals were awful, and the game just wasn’t fun. Hell, what I’ve written is only the tip of the ice berg, there’s plenty more to complain about like how the game will crash if you hit the 9 key – but it’s 4am and I should really finish this damn thing up. Don’t get me wrong, this site is not here to make fun of homebrew games, nor is it here to ridicule technical limitations, but it’s the principal behind this particular game that warrants it a spot here. When it was released, Doom had already blown us away and Quake was right around the corner; expecting people to pay what it would cost to get a polished and decent retail game for this busted garbage is borderline insanity. Considering the internet searches I did just trying to find this game again, it looks like nobody bought in to Jester’s hype, and I for one am thankful for it.
It's a Gore Galore three-level speed run! Get ready to watch the poo fly.
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If gaming innovation is what you crave, look no further than the independent developer. While larger game companies rarely venture off the beaten path and continue to give us the same kinds of games year in and year out, it’s the independent developers that are admired for bringing new, daring, and innovative ideas to the table. Look no further than games like Façade, Alien Hominid, or Crimsonland to push the envelope for innovation and offer a level of addictiveness that the folks at Blizzard could only wish to achieve. These developers rarely ask for much as their games are free, or at least affordable enough that no one would mind kicking a little bit of cash their way. It’s another thing when some kid in his parents’ basement develops an uninspired and broken knockoff running on a dated and 3D engine while attempting to drum up controversy to get his game noticed – all at the low, low price of twenty-five bucks. Sound unreal? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Gore Galore.
