Monolith[1] made some of my favorite games growing up.
It started with Shogo, but also No One Lives Forever, Tron 2.0 and F.E.A.R. left deep impressions.
What stood out was the combination of their well-done 3D engine with world building and art direction.
It wasn't the same from game to game, each game had their very distinct feel, and always interesting.
And I think few shooters have as good enemy AI as the goal-oriented[1] ones in F.E.A.R. (sadly not used in the sequels)
Good times, good times...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_Productions
[2]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/building-the-ai-of-f-e-...
I haven't seen a .tk domain in probably 20 years. It was super popular with young gamers during the early 00s due to the free domain. What a blast from the past!
Also a blast from the past, the OMM review of NOLF: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/751.html
Hilarious, hilarious game. Nightdive Studios, known for remastering old games such as System Shock, Doom 64, and Turok, tried their hardest to get the rights to the game, but apparently nobody knows who owns it! https://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-...
NOLF2 was hilarious. The samurai sword fiht in a trailer park while a hurricane blows through it! The fight against French mimes toting machine guns (Ah, ze pain is unbearable)!
This game is on GOG's "Dreamlist" of games to preserve on their platform, so if you're interested in playing it, vote for it!
https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/the-operative-no-one-live...
I own both games on disc and played part of the first one a couple of years ago on Windows 10. Absolutely stellar game, I’ve always meant to finish one of these days and get to the sequel…
IIRC it did indeed require some fiddling with config files and maybe even community patches to get a wide aspect ratio to work, and weapon viewmodels would still end up stretched.
Highly recommend giving these games a shot!
The legality of this seems questionable, though? The site itself doesn’t appear to acknowledge anything related to that.
Here, have some fresh NOLF-inspired tunes while you revisit (I had Ba De Dum stuck in my head, lol):
What a great game series. This really shows what an innovative and campy gaming industry we used to have. You don't see games like this anymore, especially not from big studios. Maybe in the indie scene - but mostly not in the same scope.
Wow I remember when this came out. Finding the different clues on the ground was pretty amazing back then. I played that PC Gamer demo over and over and over.
These games were great. They really pushed the style and creativity of first-person shooters forward with their level and mission design.
Oh wow, outstanding game. One of very few games I played through to the end. Reminisced about it recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41753079.
Can I run this under linux?
I feel compelled to say that NOLF is awesome, and it's also source-available:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20020217233624/http://pc.ign.com...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20010720053220/http://noonelives...
- https://github.com/osgcc/no-one-lives-forever
- https://github.com/haekb/nolf1-modernizer
Please be careful using a release distributed on a site without TLS and links to other certain well-known file sharing sites.