In a discussion at the
Duke4.net Forums, a user from China mentioned an obscure Taiwanese FPS game called
MARS 3D he characterized as an illegal "Doom hack". After several users expressed interest in this previously unknown title, he managed to run his copy in DOSBox (albeit not without effort) and
recorded a couple of videos, now available on YouTube:
Intro video and self-playing "attract mode" demos
Actual gameplay
The game obviously uses a lot of content "borrowed" from other games from that time (notably
Wolfenstein 3-D,
Doom and
Duke Nukem 3D, but also
Warcraft II), however the engine seems to be original, as it has features either not found in
Doom engine games, or features that the engine itself is capable of but they aren't present together in any single official game, precluding the possibility of a resource hack. These fatures include:
- animated cutscenes
- mission briefings
- friendly NPCs the player can talk to
- grenade and flamethrower type weapons
- fog effect
- underwater areas with visual distortion effect
Additionally, the game utilizes certain file formats for media (e.g. sound and music) that are not characteristic of the
Doom engine.
The owner of the copy was so kind as to share the image of it (just scroll down the thread linked to above).
Another user also made a
video of the gameplay.