In the 3rd age of man, the criminal elite direct you, the hunter, to travel to distant and hostile worlds. Armed with the latest in hunter hardware, your mission is to kill anything that moves and steal anything not nailed down.You're a Hunter. You've got a gun. You know how to use it. Let the games begin.
- Sloped ceilings, floors, and walls.
- High resolution, fully rendered sprites. FOUR times as many pixels as equivalent games.
- Random ammunition, health item, and monster generators provide infinite replayablility.
- Fully rendered and animated intro and cut scenes.
- Five distinct characters to choose from, each with their own individual characteristics and weapons.
- On-screen features such as the A.S.S. cam rearview, heat and motion sensors, and rotating maps.
- Multi-player mode offers the opportunity for eight players to go at it in 10 network levels. There's also decoys, clones, the holosuit (become a killer tree), plus serial and modem play for head-to-head action.
~ from the back of the box
A lot can be said about the engine a game chooses to use. Today, we have the malleable likes of Unity or Unreal, but back in the 90's most games sported a bespoke toolset. The closest I can think of to today's development tools were created by id Software and included the famed likes of the Wolf3D or Doom engines. With the glut of Doom-clones that flooded the market, they were engines that were licensed out to multiple developers wildly differing in quality. An intermediate engine was created by them in 1992 for Raven Software and the development of their 1993 dungeon crawler Shadowcaster, a working relationship that would result in the Heretic and Hexen series. Called the Raven Engine in their honour, it was also licensed to a company called Softdisk Publishing who could do with it as they pleased. And what they did was In Pursuit of Greed.
This budget first-person-shooter released in 1996 right when Quake was wowing PC gamers with its full 3D rendering so In Pursuit of Greed looked ancient by comparison. The orthogonal level design and raycasted approximation of three dimensions made environments look dull and uninteresting, even if the small team of developers at Mind Shear Software managed to wrangle sloped floors and ceiling out of it - a feature omitted from the fully featured Doom toolkit.
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Make use of having the full release and choose your chapter (left).
The map will show where you've been, where enemies are and the location of important items (right).
Being a shareware title, the first part was freely distributed to give players a taste of what's to come, with nagging screens begging for you to buy the full release. I can image very few did, as Mind Shear Software would disband before the year was out. Launching the complete game, you will greeted with a basic menu to select which of the three chapters you wish to play. Story-wise, there isn't much difference between them; 15,000 years into the future, a group of opportunistic hunters join a deadly game of 'kill everything' for the chance to win great wealth and esteem. It's an entertainment event commission by the criminal overlords of the galaxy, and any collateral damage is shrugged off as part of the show. Think Running Man and you have the idea. The first chapter is more sci-fi in its setting, taking place in what I assume is a space ship. The second goes all future-medieval as you shuffle around castle walls and grounds. The last takes place on an asteroid-set military base that's a bit of a mix between the first two.
Each stage has a mission objective before you can reach the exit. There will be an artefact of great importance that must be retrieved before the goody two-shoes Imperial Council know about it. It's hidden somewhere in the level which requires the use of switches, keys and trapdoors to allow access to every square-inch of it. There are also secondary collectables which will randomly appear and disappear on the map. Pick these up to gain points. Find the primary object, and enough of the secondary to unlock the exit which will be a randomly positioned teleportation device.
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Flip switches to open locked doors elsewhere in the level. Usually miles away (left).
The 'Exit' will appear when the winning conditions are met, but it could be anywhere (right).
On top of these objectives, you have the usual health, ammo and upgrade pick-ups, none of which are particularly original. What is original is the choice of playable characters. The face of the game is Tobias Locke, a 27-year-old cyborg but you can also choose Xith the Zolleesian lizard man, Aldus Kaden, the cow-faced Mooman dressed like Rambo, a mutant codenamed Specimen 7 and a sexy dominatrix named Theola Nom of the bio-engineered homo majestrix race. They all play functionally the same with each equipped with a close-combat melee weapon and a basic projectile that functions like a pistol. The weapons are nicely realised, as are the enemies which were all created by 3D Studios Max.
But it's the levels that let the whole thing down. By having those needed objects appear and disappear randomly, you will spend a lot of time wandering back and forth already explored level. You do have a map, and that map can show important information such as the location of enemies and targets, but I did find that the items at least frequently disappeared before I got there. Other features include the suggestively-named A.S.S. cam, which is essentially a rear-view mirror which looks cool, but functionally a little redundant.
Two years after the game out, the prolific budget publisher WizardWorks re-released the game renaming it to Assassinator. The only thing that's different is the harsh trimming of any reference to its original name, including an awkward cut in the opening cinematic. By this time, Half-Life was inching on to the market making this two-year-old game running on a six-year-old prototype engine even more behind the times. By this point games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D were likely just as cheap on GT Interactive's Replay budget label. A Windows source port called xGreed is new on the scene and, barring some control issues, shows promise. Currently, the original DOS release is the best way to play In Pursuit of Greed, though I doubt this unremarkable game will get much of a reappraisal. Entirely average.
To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the DOS originals to modern systems and xGreed for the Windows Souce Port. Text Manuals and Design Document included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.
File Size: 228 Mb. Install Size: 413 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ
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In Pursuit of Greed is © Softdisk, Inc
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me
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I think this was the game where in multiplayer you could disguise yourself as items. Assuming that's correct, that is the only thing I remember about it after playing it back then.
ReplyDeleteA release like this gives me hope for Tek War to release one day.
ReplyDeleteAmazing! Thank You Very Much! :D
ReplyDeleteThank you very much. Dont know this game but i will give it a try soon.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the game. I remember going through alot of the older FPS games and coming across this one. I did play the DOS version and the Windows Port too, but felt the game was lacking much like Eradicator. There was another game called Inextremis or Extremis or something. Funnily enough, I remember that game more than this one. It took a while to get the hang of the game, but I thought it was better.
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