If you liked Duke Nukem....

..you'll love 'Blood'.

It's based on a marginally more advanced version of the same engine and has a similar feel to it. It's a real classic I never heard of before, and you can download the first episode for free.

A few issues getting it working on XP but a web search turns up all the answers.

Blood is awesome!

Yeah played it, it was cool. Played it coop too :-) Also look for Shadow Warrior.

I'm just surprised I never heard of it before, being so good. I will take a look for Shadow Warrior... when I'm done with BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!

My favorite line: "When you get to hell, tell 'em I sent you. You'll get a group discount." Or was that Blood 2?

have i just wandered into 1996? ah yes, the strange wobbly spacial thing on my landing

I bought Blood 2 quite a few years pack, actually a good game also! + the mission packs.

Blood was one of the first demos I played. Scared the hell out of me. I guess I didn't recover as it's still a memory.

Yes, I agree! Blood is one of the best dos shooters ever! Great levels, great acting, great music, great horror-movie/literature references = great game!
I've replayed it through using VDMSound last year and it still is as good as all that time ago!

Ah, fond memories. It's even better with VDMSound, I think. The little crackles here and there and the midi replayer not going full speed gives the game a very quaint old feel. The music becomes that much more spooky anyway.

My first experience with Blood:

I found my way into the crematorium, hopped on the conveyor belt and crouched, waiting for my inevitable doom. On the way there, Caleb sings 'Row, row, row your boat'... I since learn it was completely random, but it rather freaked me out at the time. =]

Well, those are all great and all, but up until you've played F.E.A.R., Postal 2, HL2, Condemned, or No One Lives Forever 2, then I don't wanna know any more about it.

Hey it might play OK in DOSBox...

I worked on a commercial addon for Blood called Cryptic Passage. But don't ask me how you could get ahold of it. I don't even have a copy myself.

Wow sswift tell me more. What did you do on it?

*STOP PRESS* Cryptic Passage is actually included with the download. You have to pay a few $ to download from this source, but here it is..

*Edit*
<LINK REMOVED - no longer sure of the legality of this download as it's still available for purchase on the Lith site>

I did the mine level, and the the library's exterior and first floor, as well as some technical stuff like making areas over areas and "subways" work properly. I don't remember if I did anything else for it.

The mine level is the better of the two levels as far as gaeplay goes. The guy that finished the library level did so in one day, so a lot of the puzzles I'd planned for it, as well as the basement I think, got tossed by the wayside. But the library looks better. I modeled it after a local library which was built in the 1920's or something.

Making the second floor visible from the first in the reception area was a real pain in the ass, because with that engine the "sectors" in areas-over-areas had to be split up just right or you would get a hall-of-mirrors effect from the sector not being drawn. I think the issue was that you couldn't see a vertical slice of the first floor's walls at the same X as a vertical slice of the second floor's walls at the same time.

Hey Nomen Luni, great find! I signed up for a month at that
site. I'm downloading a game now. What a great library of
games.

@sswift - thanks for that... I'm a sucker for the odd bit of inside video game history. I haven't played those yet, but I know from the original Blood the is a massive variation in the quality of levels. One day indeed...

@drew - I know it.. but a word of warning (sorry a bit late I know).. a lot of these games are pretty old and I haven't been able to get a lot of them working in XP.

This site tells you how to run Blood flawlessly...
http://buildxp.deathmask.net/

Sanitarium also looks great and works straight off the bat.

I bought all the Bloods in one pack and that dammed Cryptic Passage never ever worked :( They said the CPU was too fast and it was finishing the program before it had actually executed and I had to get a 'CPU slower' program...still never worked for me though. Gave the whole bundle away in the end...but enjoyed 1 and 2 greatly.

Wow, you've been around too, havn't you...

OK, well, check out theunderdogs.com.orwhatever. They have a full (movie ripped) download. Cryptic Passage is not as hard as you may think to find - it became part of the 'One Whole Unit Blood' pack which is relatively easy to find.

Wow, so cool. To a Blood fan like me, you're a legend ;)

Unless you're a big Blood fan you might not have heard of it, but I worked on an addon called 'Gods', which quite a few people seemed to enjoy. It was designed to be the hardest bunch of levels ever created. We were going to make Gods 2 for Blood 2, but the editor for B2 was a tad underdone. I still have some original voices for it by Stephan Weyte (the voice of Caleb) that Monolith did for us while recording the stuff for the Nightmare levels expansion.

Good times...

I still hang out on the Blood forum, and have been there since Blood 2 was announced. There's not much to see there now though... the spammers have finally found it. I also did some work on Planetblood.com... so hearing about Blood now is like a sweet trip down memory lane :)

Ah, the wonders of Blood's multiplayer...

If you still have Duke3D and want it running nicely under WinXP go to JonoF's site and get hold of his JFDuke3D port.

There's a Hi-Res texture pack too for the ultimate Duke'em'up.

Blood is indeed good fun and retains a lot of Dukes appeal.

It's a pity that Blood runs way slow in DOSBox, one of the damn great FPS games during the DOS age....

Have a look here yoko:

http://buildxp.deathmask.net/