Terminal reality games

Hamilton Killian used to be a Spookhouse agent until he became instable after the death of his wife and left the agency not quite voluntarily when it started to accept monsters into its ranks. Now he calls on the Spookhouse for help with paranormal activities around his mansion. Stranger takes on the seemingly harmless mission alone, but soon finds himself inside of a sadistic deathtrap.

At first glance, Nocturne could be mistaken for a blunt Resident Evil clone. When looking deeper, however, the similarities don't go much farther than both games being action adventure games with cinematic, fixed camera angles and a horror scenario.

Whereas other games in the genre that has become known as survival horror almost invariably feel stiff with cumbersome fighting, Nocturne controls surprisingly flexible. The Stranger can jump, strafe and run while shooting things that to this day seem to be problematic for the Resident Evil series. The standard control scheme in fact doesn't differ much from your average FPS.

Unfortunately, the changing perspectives don't lend itself too well to this style of play, it's easy to get confused with directions and one definitely wants to keep manual aim switched off most of the time, as hitting something on purpose is nigh impossible from more artistic camera angles.

The auto aim works really well, though, but it won't help either when facing the completely wrong direction by accident. Scene transitions also come sometimes quite abprupt and unexpected. Those unfortunate enough to be caught in a tight spot in battle just around a point that triggers a scene transition can consider themselves as good as dead. The guys a Terminal Reality well knew of the problems of fixed camera angles, and offer a remedy for situations like that, albeit a temporary and somewhat unreliable one.

Among the gadgets The Stranger gets from Doc Holliday is a prototype night vision device, that allows for exploration and combat in first person perspective. The areas are fully modeled in 3d, but not textured, which is excused by the somewhat impaired vision that naturally comes with such devices. Of course its use is also limited to darker areas, but worse is the battery, which lasts no longer than a few seconds at a time before it needs to recharge. The doc also has more martialistic gear to offer.

Her newest death-dealer is the "Sun of God", which causes a beam of light almost as bright as sunrays. While most creatures are merely blinded by the weapon, it means instant death to vampires. Most of the time The Stranger relies on his standard dual guns, preferably loaded with silver bullets. Their biggest draw is the ability to aim at two different enemies at the same time.

Even if they take a lot of time to kill stronger enemies, this helps to keep them at bay until they finally succumb to the continued shelling.

A crossbow is indispensable, too, and the Stranger can also use whatever weaponry he may find during a mission to maltreat his enemies with, from an axe to a tommy gun. Although the amount of action is more than most comparable games in the genre, the "adventure" element isn't neglected, either.

The distribution between both aspects differs between episodes, but even the most action-oriented parts break up every once in a while to demand a more conciderate approach to some problems. Most puzzles are integrated logically into the mission. In act II for example, the Stranger has to escort the survivors in the zombie-infested town to the church to get the time to question them and maybe find out more about the origin of the catastrophe.

Later on, Stranger sends a box of dynamite through a mining lift to detonate it and open up a blocked up passage. All too constructed puzzles about chess figures, exploding floor tiles and complex lever games are reserved for the last mission, as that takes place in a single huge death trap labyrinth for the creatures of the night. Terminal Reality has always been partly a technology company that spends as much effort on a solid and impressive programming fundament as on game design and scenario.

Nocturne 's engine is in many ways its spiritual antecede. When the game was first presented, it bedazzled most onlookers with its elaborate cloth animations, but even more impressive from a technical standpoint was the dynamic lighting with realtime shadows cast from multiple light sources. Mirror effects weren't a matter of course yet, either. The mostly dark backgrounds themselves were standard fare for late '90s renderings, but the way the effects helped to merge them together with characters into a coherent whole hadn't been seen in that quality before.

Terminal Reality isn't really connected to Germany in any way, except for their games occasionally taking place there. Yet they always had a peculiar standing in that country due to contents that would make any rating board cringe - violence, sex, Nazis Surprisingly enough, Nocturne got away with a and-up rating without having to make any compromises concerning the gore or nudity.

There was, however, another issue that caused a headache for the publisher - The first episode takes place in and around a fictional German castle called Gaustadt. A Gau used to be a regional administrative unit during the Third Reich. As a matter of fact, the term has been in use for centuries before the Nazis, and even today it is part of several real place names. Nonetheless, it seemingly was too dicey a name for the dreck medium that video games used to be in the eyes of the government, thus the castle was renamed to Naustadt.

More eye-catching than the lighting in this respect are the blood splatters that are soon spilt all over the place when Stranger meets with a pack of werewolves or a horde of zombies. Nocturne is a truly gruesome game, with monsters throwing the severed limbs of their fallen fellows at the player and flies praying on the hacked remains. Characters are burned alive, a fate most cringeworthy when it happens to the Stranger: The flames slowly burn him into a lump of coal, without anything one can do about it.

He shows no signs of pain and can continue to run around and ignite monsters, until the flames consume him whole. Creepy stuff.

But Nocturne not only excelled in terms of violent content, also the handling of sexual themes set a new benchmark, at least for commercially published American games. After all, Nocturne was one of the games published through GoD, the then famous-infamous mavericks of the video game industry.

Equally explicit uncensored texturing is nothing we'll see much in any games published after the demise of that alliance. It certainly can be argued that this amount of detail is unnecessary, but it appears never out of place when Stranger seeks refuge from chicago mobs inside of a bordello or is seduced by a succubus. After all, horror and eroticism always maintain a strange and grotesque symbiosis, just ask Jonathan Harker what happened in Dracula's castle when the count wasn't at home.

To a truly cinematic presentation also belongs an adequate voice-over, and this is another point where Nocturne succeeds. Lynn Mathis as The Stranger delivers the perfect cynical, laid-back anti-hero performance, and the supporting cast is well complemented by their voices, too, taking their roles just with the necessary amount of fake seriousness. Hiram Mottra sounds as paranoid as any sane person would see someone who constantly claims he's sensing malevolence towards his person in others, Candace Evans as Svetlana Lupescu delivers an almost convincing Bela Lugosi-imitation, while in the role of Elspeth Holliday she's the typical well-educated upper class lady.

The cutscene choreography didn't age quite as well. Special animations are sparse and don't look all that natural, but worst of all the sequences are quite glitchy. All are realized in-engine, and elements are subject to the same rules as they are during regular play. Mostly complications only result in some awkward setups, but in a worst case example characters can get stuck in the scenery indefinitely, forcing one to skip the cutscene, which fortunately is always an option.

There is even one particular cutscene where that glitch occurs regularly, making it impossible to watch through the whole scene. Aside from slightly problematic controls and a number of glitches, Nocturne is almost a perfect game in its chosen subgenre.

The characters are designed over the top just so much to give the game a note of humour without ridiculing themselves, the level design feels very authentic for the individual locations and the action is always challenging but rarely frustrating at least with activated auto aim. Especially the last mission is designed as an extraordinarily intense and deadly experience with tricky puzzles one can actually get stuck at for a while, something the "adventure elements" of the perceived main competitor Resident Evil never achieved.

Survival horror fans seeking to test their skills, this is just the game for you. And if that wasn't enough, players could always design their own missions, worlds and characters in the Nocturne engine, provided solid technical skills and a copy of 3D Studio Max.

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The sequel to 4x4 Evolution, 4x4 Evo 2 is an offroad racing game developed by Terminal Reality. Rustin Parr is the first in a trilogy of survival horror games that reuse the Nocturne engine and feature story elements related to the horror movie, The Blair Witch Project.

Nocturne is a survival horror game set in the s and 30s. As a member of a secret government organization "The Stranger" investigates sightings of zombies, werewolves, demons and other monsters and fights them all over the world. Along with classic lap and point-to-point races, there are a variety of multiplayer king of the hill and monster truck rally events.