By: Mike Ponicki
August 2nd, 1999

Humansoft, a company I know only for their PC port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo (a good port I might add), has just released a test demo of their latest title, Seed. What is Seed you ask? Seed is a first-person shooter mated with a 3d platformer. The concept made me raise an eyebrow in interest, as I used to make Quake levels right along those same lines. So how good is this Seed demo anyway?

Let me first say that I really hope this test demo is very early along in the game's production line. That is, the engine is clearly incomplete and slow as heck. In software, there's no transparencies (which are used all the time), and it hardly ever exceeds 5fps. In OpenGL on my RivaTNT (32bpp), the game runs at around 15fps, which is playable for me, but probably not for most PC gamers. Transparencies also work in OpenGL, and the quality of the textures becomes more apparent. Still, the OpenGL renderer looks hardly done either, there's a lot of pixelization on some of the textures, no mipmapping, and the lighting looks very odd at times. Also, the enemy animations are really horrid, they are obviously not finished. As far as completion, this test demo reminds me of running the QTest on the 486 I had at the time that came out- it's slow, looks incomplete, but gives you an idea of what the finished product will be like.

Conceptually, the game seems to work fine. The levels scream platformer and fps both, which I think is what Humansoft's goal is.

On the platformer side, the levels involve a lot of jumping. Your character can jump very high too, a characteristic of the genre. But how do you make coordinated jumps in the first person? Well, in Seed, you can see your character's body, even in the first person. So, if you look down, you see your character's torso and feet, which makes it a lot easier to complete those tough jumps. I had no problem with that part of the gameplay. Also, the Seed engine does real-time shadows, and your player's shadow sometimes helps you line up your jumps. You can also play Seed in the third person, and while that makes some jumps easier, the fighting part of the game is next to impossible without playing in the first person. The enemies also trigger those fond platformer memories. There are two enemies in the test demo, the first is a walking, reptilian guy with a big mouth. He just randomly paces around the area, making no attempt to attack you unless you walk right up to him. A typical early-level platform baddie. The second enemy is a fly-type creature that flies around until you shoot at it. Then it starts making passes at you with its big stinger. Again, another enemy straight out of a platformer.

On the fps side, this game is dark. Dark in the sense that the engine is pitch black and I had to crank my driver gamma up to 1.7 :), but I'm actually talking about atmosphere. The lighting, textures, weapons, and even enemies to an extent are out of a fps. First, there's the factory theme in the levels. It looks like one of Bleszinski's Unreal maps. Then, the weapons are pretty fps. The number 1 weapon rapidly fires these green laser bolts. They don't do much damage, but you have unlimited ammo for this weapon. Next, there's the flame-thrower, which reminds me of a Megaman weapon. It shoots limited range, limited spread fire. The third and final weapon in the test demo is a rocket launcher- sort of. It fires rockets like a fps rocket launcher. But the projectiles are really slow moving, like the little yellow balls the flies in Sonic shoot at you.

The Seed test demo gives a fairly clear picture of what the final game will be like. It takes some practice, just like any new style of game does, but once you get into it, Seed is really fun. If the final game has better enemy animations and runs at about twice the framerate, I'll buy it.