Hey everyone, Rees here, and welcome to another episode of ctrl-alt-rees.
Now, I don't usually cover current releases and current events on my channel, but over
the weekend I had a few people send me links to this, and I took a look at it, and I thought wow!
This is really impressive, this is the kind of thing that I really want to share on my channel.
…and what it is is - basically, over the weekend there has been a big demo party
over in Poland called SillyVenture, and it's an annual event, and it's in its 20th year - or,
well, technically it's in its 21st year - but the 20th year ended up being postponed until this year
for obvious reasons, and to mark that really big occasion one of the guys involved in one of
the demo groups - a guy called “KK” from a group called Altair - has announced and also released
a version of his Amiga first person shooter which is in development at the moment for the Atari ST.
Now, the game is obviously influenced by Doom as a lot of these early shooters are,
it's called Dread, and as far as tech demos go it's really really impressive.
Obviously I took a look at the Atari STE port of Wolfenstein 3D on my channel a couple of months
ago, and that was really really cool to look at but this is yet another step above that I think,
and the cool thing is that DMA-Sc who did the music for Wolfenstein 3D
is also on board with this project and has done the music for Dread as well.
So what I'm going to do is: I'm going to demo this on my 4MB STE here,
and I have my RetroTINK-5X, and basically what I'm going to do
is just play through the first level - no commentary, no waffling over the top of
it - to show it off in all of its glory and then share some of my thoughts at the end.
So I think, without further ado, let's check it out.
…and there we have it: Dread on the Atari ST.
I'm sure you'll agree it's looking pretty great so far - it's got all of the elements
that you would expect from a Doom-style game: obviously we've got doors, we've got secrets,
we've got different weapons, we've got ammo pickups, health pickups, key cards,
different types of enemies - it's all there in that one short demo level, and the game- obviously
it's running at about 6 or 7 FPS so far, although it actually seems a lot smoother than that.
I'm not really sure what it is
about the gameplay that makes it feel smoother but it does feel really smooth to play,
particularly compared to that version of Wolfenstein 3D that I checked out not so long ago,
and one aspect that I thought was really really cool about this game is the fact that the
controls use WASD and the mouse to look around - obviously you can't look up and down - but,
you know, your bog-standard modern first person shooter setup on an FPS on the Atari ST.
Of course that was possible with the original Doom on the PC with a little bit of fiddling, and
really really cool to see on the ST - and yeah, it makes the game really playable and a lot of fun.
So this is a project that I'm definitely going to be keeping
my eye on as it develops - I'm not sure if I'm going to do regular updates or basically
if I'm just going to wait for the final release to do a review, but yeah.
I hope you enjoyed checking out Dread with me - if you have any thoughts on it at all
please do let me know down in the comments, if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs
up - it helps me to increase the visibility of my videos and helps me to grow my channel - and if
you want to see more Atari ST stuff please do consider subscribing to the channel!
I'll put a link to that Wolfenstein 3D port at the end of this video as
well so you can check that out, and I'll also put a link to the original
announcement and everything else down in the description as always.
So thank you very much for joining me and hopefully I'll see you again next time!