The video game golden age started very soon after the crash of 1983. Once PC games started getting more powerful and developers became more experimental, Wolfenstein 3D hit the market and changed a lot of rules. Many unspoken rules were broken, as blood was usually seen as a huge turnoff for parents and wouldn't want their kids to buy it. The smart developers like Id Software knew that kids weren't the demographic with the real money and they weren't the only ones that wanted to play awesome games.
Wolfenstein did a lot of things different. Not only did it bring 3D gameplay through programming tricks, making it faster and more accessible for players, but it also kept score of how many of Hitler's forces you took out. It also kept track of the treasure and the secrets that you found in the level. Of course, gamers latched onto this like fat on meat. It suddenly became so important to get through levels faster, as the ending stats also kept track of the time it took you to get through each mission. At the end of each episode, it would also give you the percentages of all of it calculated together.
I don't remember how long it took, but using the manual with all of the level maps, me, my dad and my brother set out to hit 100% of every single level. Anytime we got to a level exit, we saved it and go back through the level, looking for what we missed. The maps showed you the enemy locations as seen in I Am Death Incarnate and also showed you the location of every secret and treasure. Sure, it sounds like that would make it easy, and it did make it less time consuming, but that's like saying I got a cup of water from the Sea World whale tank.
Wolfenstein 3D is HARD. There are levels that can be cleaned up with very little effort, especially in the first episode, but once you get to episode 5 or 6, we are dealing with officers on top of the SS troops. They went insane with the hallways filled with enemies lined up like a firing squad. In certain levels, you either went through very long hallways, inching forward to alert enemies, or just run down the hallway and wail on them with the chaingun. The latter is more time efficient, but not as sure to work.
There were levels, as some Wolfenstein 3D players will tell you, where you cannot get 100% of everything. There came points in the game where the devs thought it would be oh so funny to put in secret mazes with which you needed to push the walls in certain ways. We ended up drawing on the map with pencil. We got as many as we could with all of the items that we could, but you can't just push walls at random, you may very well get stuck.
The bosses were come and go in difficulty. The biggest difficulty we had were with the zombies on Episode 2. Yes, they were extremely difficult. Hans Grosse is one thing, but enemies with such a high firing rate and NO emergence sound, you will be lucky if you get all of them the first time you shoot them in a room. There is always one peeking around the corner, ready to shoot you with its weird hand chest gun thing. The easiest part of episode 2 was the boss fight. He was a doctor guy that threw syringes at you and they were easy to dodge.
Beyond that, Episode 6 had to be the most challenging out of any of them. Officers in big numbers can be a pain in the ass to take down. This requires a great deal of chaingun fire, which drains your ammo like none other. The worst parts are when there are long, open hallways, and the officers are set to sneak mode. So you can't just fire your weapon to alert them, they need to see you and then they will attack. One run down the hallway will alert all of them and then turning around may be the death of you if you're not fast enough.
Still, we got every single level to 100% that we could, even taking on the last guy, who has a chaingun as well as a small rocket launcher. The fourth episode boss had the rocket launcher alone, which made him easy once you figured out his pattern and could dodge his projectiles. They were faster than the weirdo who created the zombies, but still very much in line with an easier opponent than Hans or Mecha Hitler. As always, Episode 1 and Episode 3 were our favorites. Taking down Hitler himself was a milestone in the game and then the rest of them were more of a good thing, but also quite a handful, if we're being honest. Wolfenstein 3D remains a godsend of its time. There is so much innovation for the genre, even if it is not as appreciated as it once was by the current crowd. Still, it brought The New Order, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and even the underappreciated 2009 game. Always remember where it started, when you gave Mecha Hitler a lethal dose of American Virtua Justice!
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