Hired Guns: Your memories (plus some fun fan-created stuff!)

[lilalurl]

Thanks for the details about the HG sequel. My reaction is similar to Cherno's post (#18).

[Lord Aga]

HG is the best game ever created. No contest.
Too bad there was never a proper Amiga sequel. HG2 AGA would have been mind blowing.
Even a "true 3D" PC HG game would have been interesting, especially with the original writer on board. But such manager bullcrap makes me furious. "We want you to write a cool story, but no you can't write that." Because managers know so much more about writing than writers...

Originally Posted by Cherno

Two more questions:

1. From the blog " (In fact, as part of the plot I'd even managed to come up with an invention that wasn't realised in the real world until 2007, but that's for another post.)"

Which invention would that be?

The Image Authentication Camera. As part of the original plot, the team had to record proof of what was happening. One of the big influences in my thinking was the film The Running Man, oddly enough. I was watching the scene where they fake Ben Richard's death and right next to me was an Amiga magazine with a free covermounted 3D rendering program. In the real future, I thought, faking stuff will be easy so I came up with the idea of a camera that you could prove the images were real.

Now you can get cameras with checksums and so on which show that the image hasn't been tampered with. I'm sure other people have had the idea, but I was quite pleased about thinking of it back then.

Originally Posted by Cherno

2. Who came up with the idea of the Psi-Amps? I could imagine the dev team having taken the step from a fantasy to a sci-fi game and in order to have something akin to magic spells, the Amps got introduced as a futuristic substitute for spell scrolls. However they came to be it's a cool idea and something no other game has in this form.

Psi-Amps were Scott Johnston's idea. It was pretty much a direct replacement for spells and I think internally the game's code still refers to them as spells. I was toying with the idea of calling them 'Invokers' which was not a million miles away from Iain Banks' 'Effectors'...

Originally Posted by Predseda

What I always felt odd in Hired guns were some enemies. In my opinion HG was a serious game and I didn't like much those squirrels, puppies (!) and lemmings that were trying to kill me. They were ruining the overal atmosphere and didnt fit among Rahls, sentries, various robots, skeletons and other scifi and fantasy creatures.

We did tend to have a weird sense of humour... If it helps, I suppose you could think of those bits as part of the training simulation

Originally Posted by Cherno

I love these little behind-the-scenes tidbits, it must be horrible having to deal with these kinds of coporate decisions when you are just trying to make a good game

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

But such manager bullcrap makes me furious. "We want you to write a cool story, but no you can't write that." Because managers know so much more about writing than writers...

In the HG universe there is no faster than light travel. There was a load of good reasons for it, but when I wrote down that sentence the CEO scribbled a note which read "Science Fiction fans will hate this." Guess he's never read The Forever War...

[Astrofra]

Hired Guns was one of my favorite titles on the Amiga.
We spent hours with a couple of friends, exploring the traps & searching for cool new weapons

I was so impressed by this game that I started to create some bitmaps for a clone of HG I wanted to create myself (in AmosBasic, haha).

Unfortunately, it never went further than a few mockups

The landing sequence (supposedly for the intro of the 'game', I don't remember)


The mercenaries :


A mockup of the 'in game' view :


Now that I think of it, these heads I drew, back then, were most probably a total rip of the work of Enki Bilal.

[Cherno]

I remember doing something similar for an Amiga version of Command & Conquer 1. You somehow know that it's basically wasted time but you still do it just because you love the game so much

Oh btw, that one HG level with the monks who cast fireballs that bounced off walls unpredictably and stayed forever? So annoying!

Also one level, I think it was the Ammunition Depot, where you have to get all characters through a high room filled with water to reach the exit.. I spent hours figuring out exactly how to use the "part water" Psi-Amps so all those nifty Flour-Lasers and other items that got damaged under water could be carried to the next level

Having maps of all maps and all levels sure helped a lot but it'S still amazing how lost you could get on the relatively small maps, I think the map sizes where about 16x16x16 ? The added third dimension sure was a novelty back then, I can't remember too many other games that had multiple rooms_above rooms, deep chasms, and so on.... Maybe Liberation (Captive II), but that came much later. Even the very first mapo, Abandoned Depot, was mighty impressive even though it had a fairly simple layout, but the dark underwater section was scary with all those lurking monsters, and one of them was an elite type of creature with a rainbow shield, when I pulled back the blocks where it was hiding behind I remember running halfway back through the level just to be in a good position to attack

[Lobotomika]

Memories eh? I have this memory of seeing the news about the release of Hired Guns on a local mag, playing it, deciding it's a game of depth AND user interaction problems; ultimately abandoning it but never forgetting the artistic genius behind it.

I had to change my forum password right now because many of my modern passwords are still hired guns related

And I still think it stinks to play a game like this with a fuckin' commodore mouse.

Cherno, your paper miniatures rock; I'd love to live in a world where genius like this was the mainstream instead of the shit we have today.

Also: [ Show youtube player ]

[fishyfish]

If everyone was doing cool/"genius" stuff then it'd be boring, cos t would be the mainstream

As for Hired Guns, it's one of quite a few amiga games I didnt play much "back in the day" that Id like to (but probably never will) give another try. Based on reviews and lots of peoples recommendations I did try it, but could never really get into. Back then I was more into "quick fix" type games moreso than anything with any kind of depth (save for a few point n click adventures, Populous (1+2), Bards Tale(s), and probably a couple of others that I cant think of right now).

[lilalurl]

Originally Posted by Cherno

Having maps of all maps and all levels sure helped a lot but it'S still amazing how lost you could get on the relatively small maps, I think the map sizes where about 16x16x16 ?

A bit more actually:
23x23 (X,Y) x 20 (Z)

I agree that they managed to put quite a lot of areas to explore/get lost in a relatively space.

Clever use of floors and walls!
I rarely get lost in 3D games, but I have to admit that sometimes I am surprised when I see which areas are above/below others when checking the levels in the editor.

[Predseda]

Hired guns is just a phenomenon.

[Cherno]

Originally Posted by Lobotomika

Cherno, your paper miniatures rock; I'd love to live in a world where genius like this was the mainstream instead of the shit we have today.

Also: [ Show youtube player ]

Cheers! Maybe some day I will put some more work into it and write some rules and stuff

Oh, and that HG music medley is awesome, I think I listened to it all the time when I made those paper miniatures Good for inspiration

[FromWithin]

Hired Guns was a brilliant piece of work.

I did some death match levels for it and am credited, but have no idea whatsoever which one(s) they are. I wouldn't be able to remember now even if shown to me. I do remember bits of two of them that I did. One that started off at the top of a tower, and another that was far too puzzley for a death match level and ended up going down this long staircase into a massive cavern. What a great editor it had. I held on tightly to the Amiga 3000 that I commandeered because it had a built-in flicker fixer and the editor ran in interlaced mode. It made it much easier on the eyes.

Here's the last beta of the PC sequel. It took me years to get hold of it:
http://fromwithin.com/files/HiredGunsSequel.iso

Mr. Hammond, you should at least try it so that you'll know how it turned out. See if it's the same version I've posted here. I remember being horrified at the idea when a pretty bad video of it first appeared to be put in as part of a general Psygnosis promo. I think it was called Winter's Fury then, but I think the end result is pretty good.

[Cherno]

Originally Posted by FromWithin

One that started off at the top of a tower, and another that was far too puzzley for a death match level and ended up going down this long staircase into a massive cavern.

I remember my brother, who played this game a lot with a friend in Deathmatch, enthusiastically describing the tower level, I think it was Garden of Jarrys?

[Cherno]

Herp Derp

I'm still on my Cyberpunk trip and recently I started working through a series of programming tutorials for the Unity3D game engine.

Who knows, maybe I'll try to set up a simple HG clone, too bad I suck at character modelling, animation and coding :P

[lilalurl]

If you need them, you can extract the textures and the sounds from Hired Guns 3D by using a version of UnrealED that is compatible (I tried with the one that comes with UT2004).

In theory, it should be possible to batch extract all of them using some ucc batchexport (supposing there are no custom stuff involved):
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:...portCommandlet

I'll see what can be done if you are interested.

[Cherno]

Uhm.. I'd say don't bother. I found the HG2 leaked beta extremely unappealing to look at, even accounting for the Unreal Engine which was very blocky. The textures were just bland and in fact nothing reminded me that I was playing a successor to HG with it's polished visuals. So if I ever get around to doing it I'll most likely do my own textures, especially since Unity supports all the modern nifty stuff like Normal, speculiar maps etc.

On a related note, my last attempt at creating a game was about ten years ago with 3D Game Studio, I wanted to make a FPS version of the Shadowrun SNES game, I even managed to create the first room (morgue) and make the character pick up a gun and shoot with it... Then I got bored and/or overwhelmed by the scripting work Still, it was cool writing stuff in the editor and then seeing the things you made in an actual game.

[danwood]

One of the greatest amiga games.

I remember i only had my amiga 500 when i first bought it. Multiple disk changes, limited level intro music and lesser graphics in the game. But i still loved it!

When i got my amiga 1200 its full potential was released. Hard drive access, better sound and graphics and prolonged level intro music!

Awesome!

It maybe the amiga game i played the most though i did play The Chaos Engine, Frontier and Premier Manager 3 a lot as well!

[Predseda]

I wonder if it would be possible to create Hired Guns AGA using the PC VGA graphics. It doesn't differ much, but the game would be more colourful, though. It would bring the ideal game - Amiga version has superior sound while PC version had slightly better graphics and joining these two together would create something awesome.

The same was already made with Eye of the beholder by wonderful local EAB geniuses.

[Hillsy_]

Music, particularly the character music...man it was funky! Also, getting attacked at the beginning and well...opening fire on my team-mates...