Fun fact: the third game in this series, Soldier of Fortune: Payback, was created by the same studio as Chaser, meaning that if Civvie progresses far enough into the Soldier of Fortune series, he'll get some Slav jank as a reward.
@@randomfaca I'd love to see Civvie review that one. I remember way back in the earlier RU-vid days Armake21 came out with a review of that. I just remember this one part in the video where he walks into a combat area, and an enemy npc runs around in a circle and basically 360 noscopes him after. That sealed the deal for me.
@@ferdinand12390 I think it is hilarious, because that is how Demo Dick actually talked in real life. If it were fictional, it would be a writer's poor execution of the concept. Instead, it's just an accurate representation of the man, and that makes so much better because it doesn't feel out of place since, well, that's a human person.
This game is _fascinating_ It spends almost the entire game being a semi-realistic action movie call of duty, only to out of nowhere become _a fucking Metal Gear game_ in the final act
that and the final boss design is Gray Fox/Frank Jaeger (or just Cyborg Ninja) mixed with a Power Rangers villain like Lord Zedd, same with the personality albeit leaning much more into the ladder
Raven: "so John, we're going to make a game based on your escapades as a mercenary." "Yeah that's cool but can you include a level where I fight ninjas on top of a skyscraper?"
@@Jakob_The_Stoic_Norseman hire a samurai~ (rich important people hired samurai, poor people who could not afford to hire samurai did not hire samurai)
This game has a ton of attention to detail, but what struck me the most is that- okay, you hold the big pistol (the Desert Eagle) in your right hand, right? But if you lean around a corner to the *left*, he actually tosses it to his left hand and fires it that way. It's things like that, and how you can reload the LMG with five or fewer shots left and see the exact amount of bullets in the belt's model, that really drive home that they cared.
There's two keys in the controls menu to trigger this stuff, which if used on other weapons like the 9mm pistol: It changes the stance to a two handed one. Or the shotgun? He just fliptricks the shotgun, with two variations, and the SMG, Mullins centers the weapon. And lastly, if used on the knife, it triggers Mullins cleaning the blade. This game FUCKS.
@@zbynektrajer2735 It was a licensed Soldier of Fortune Magazine game; _of course_ it had to have over the top gun porn! As a subscriber of the magazine for years back in this era, I can confirm much of its content was this too.
I feel like this was a detail that kind of got skimmed over because Civvie doesn't seem to be using it a lot in footage, that LMG's underbarrel grenade launcher is shooting white phosphorus. Absolutely brutal weapon that was made infamous in Vietnam, so of course this game recreates it surprisingly well for 2000.
If he told that we shoot White Phosphorus to enemies, a lot of Spec Ops: The Line vets would've had PTSD the moment the sentence was over. The mother still haunts me.
I only played the demo, but I love knowing that this serious and gory military shooter utterly goes off the rails and randomly gives you a campy GI Joe character as the main villain.
@@ronnickels5193He didn't even try to shot at the guys he just killed with the shotgun to see that he can cut all their limbs. He didn't even realized that he can empty a whole charger on a à enemy with the SMH and the guy will keep standing until he stops shooting. He missed a lot of fun stuff
Spent a lot of time dedicated to SoF back in the early 2000s; even worked for GameSpy's Planet Soldier of Fortune for a while. Went to QuakeCon 2001 and interviewed Kenn Hoekstra about the soon-to-be-released Soldier of Fortune II for the site. Was on the closed beta for SoF 2, which was a neat experience. Created a couple of custom game modes for SoF2 MP, specifically Kill the Man with the Ball and another that was inspired by my experience in the beta, which would ultimately be called Gunrunner. If you care, the gist of Gunrunner was that one player had a gun (the titular Gunrunner) and everyone else had a grenade they could trigger, but not throw. If you could blow up the Gunrunner, you respawned as the next Gunrunner. Points were only awarded by shooting other grenade-toting players as the Gunrunner. I eventually modded in a radar system, so everyone would know approximately where the Gunrunner was. I envisioned the mode as a fun little diversion between rounds of other objective-based game modes.
Oh man, Gamespy??? Dude I loved playing the SoF 2 multiplayer demo on gamespy lol. I also played the demo for C&C Renegade on there I think. Thank you for working on gamespy 🤘🏾
You can pretty consistently disarm enemies in this game when shooting their hands with the pistol. I love doing it, fits the 80s action movie vibe like a glove.
Hey Civvie, there is a documentary on RU-vid called "Shadow Company" that is about the rise of Private Military Companies in todays modern battlefields - John Mullins is one of the people they interviewed, and he talks about his consulting for this game. He kinda laughs it off, and says that the most unrealistic aspect of the game is that he's never been in a situation where, by himself, he'd have to kill 500 people. Worth a watch, its an interesting documentary
The way Mullins put it, makes it sound like the ninjas and the microwave gun and the rooftop helicopter fight were *marginally more realistic.* Think on that.
I had a few copies of SOF magazine from the late 70s/early 80s. It had a classifieds section that was pretty much what you would expect, but in amongst the various dudes selling military equipment of dubious origin, you'd get some cryptic message like "The Spider is now accepting new contracts".
Yeah, soldier of fortune unironically was used as a way for contract killers and mercenaries to advertise their services. And the people running the magazine definitely knew about it
in case you're wondering what kind of contracts spider might have been accepting, they were the subject of several major lawsuits in US courts because people used those classifieds to recruit for at least 3 straight up contract murders. and that was just the cases where people were dumb enough to get caught!
@wehraboohunterssvu316 oh jeeeeeez, I figured it was some kind of hired muscle or secret merc group lol. I suppose I also assumed it was a hit man too actually. That's insane
@@Flesh_Wizard I was like 14 - 15 and back then i spent time cutting the corpses apart with the knife. Also tortured the enemies by throwing knifes on their limbs,
The spas 12 has both semi auto and pump action function. Not many games devs at the time knew that. But that didnt stop them from putting the spas 12 in every shooter game after 2000.
Yep, it was intended for police use iirc and some shells (beanbags etc) don't produce enough gas to cycle a semi-auto weapon, hence needing to be able to manually cycle it with the pump. Honestly they did a fairly decent job making recognisable weapons given they didn't have the near infinite reference we have now on the modern internet. You couldn't just find a RU-vid video back then and see a gun stripped down to parts
@@0lionheart user manual if you were lucky or a trip to the dreaded public library . if you knew a prop guy you had insider knowledge. but yeah we are spoilt by guntube.
@@0lionheartand it’s not even the best shotgun with that feature. Benelli makes a much more durable shotgun that has this feature, but it doesn’t look anywhere near as cool.
@@boomerkobold3943Cooler? Nuh uh, the SPAS 12 is ugly af man, just because it looks recognizable doesn't mean it's cool, I'll take my Benelli M3 over that any day of the week.
Should have been dropping a Benelli M4 instead. Is a reason that it is widely considered one of the best shotguns out there. But I guess since it's not a pointy blocky mess it didn't look cool enough (or was too hard to render polygonally) so they went with the SPAS instead.
Omg this unlocked a core memory for me. I remember years and years ago watching a friend play a game where he was knifing people apart in some medieval setting and seeing this I realized as a kid I was misinterpreting the bunker as a castle and the low poly models as medieval armor. Holy shit, thank you for a huge nostalgia trip.
When I was an early teenager I watched my uncle play this game and was completely blown away that games could look like this. He let me play a few levels and its truly what got me into gaming. SoF is absolutely incredible and one of the most underrated "hidden gems" of FPS gaming. Great video
"Did you guys know about DaiKatana?" Okay this is a big lore hint. We all need to autistically comb through his videos and figure out when exactly they swapped our civvie
@jinxmclastname9212 hey, how's it going, you must be new. 👋 I personally think it happened in the clown room. Civvie hasn't been the same since the clown room...
I like to imagine john mullins was the one at raven going "please add cool ninjas and rocket lauchers and me running on trains and shit that would be cool" lol
@@Hamun002 Because Iraq tried to eat their cake and have it too by dismantling their WMD programs *but* also making it seem to Iran that maybe they hadn't really.
@@tartrazine5 BRO I was there, THERE WAS NO WMD's. They didn't have the launchers or capacity at all. No structure from province to province. Edit Former army and marine infantry, deployed 2x to iraq. That place was a mess. There was worse stuff than "IED's" there.
I like the mention of Dekker being Saber's brother because it implies that they both played Metal Gear Solid and that's why Dekker dresses like a straight Psycho Mantis while Saber's running around shirtless everywhere like Liquid Snake
You can keep shooting enemies and make them do the AK dance like in Goldeneye. But unlike in Goldeneye, their bodies slowly disintegrate while you do it.
Soldier of Fortune was not the first game to be adapted from a Magazine, but it was the first game to be adapted from a gun magazine. Technically, the first game to be adapted from a magazine would be Car & Driver on MS-DOS, and maybe Road & Track Presents: The Need For Speed.
I first played a demo of this game on one of those old demo disks that came with magazines. It included the entire first two levels and I must've played it like a dozen times before I got the full game. Loved this game so much - the gore, the guns, everything was so satisfying. Got crazy nostalgia watching this video.
Loved SoF1 and SoF2. Ghoul with it's 13 gore zones was the stuff back in the day! Hope you feature the second one as Raven's Ghoul and Chimera systems were the at their peak in the sequel. SoF2 grounded the modern shooter theme with less sci-fi and better cinematic scenes, even if the jungle level was unforgiving. And the procedural multiplayer maps were something no one else was doing.
I love the AI saying 'thunderclap' Civvie, damn your stuff is great! I couldn't defend Bobby Kotick if I wanted to. He's the personification of all of what's wrong with modern video games.
It's fun to make fun of Bobby Kotick because he looks like he walked off a Nazi propaganda poster, but please don't fall into the trap of scapegoating. All video game execs are cunts. Riccitiello is an even bigger piece of shit, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone make fun of him.
I replayed this so much. My favorite custom difficulty is with insane enemy spawning, but having them be very stupid, it makes it so loud weapon noises spawn in extra enemies, turning the game into either a sniper stealth game or a shotgun gauntlet.
I freakin' loved this game as a kid. Absurd load times on console but always a good time. I still walk around saying "I'm looking for a back issue of Soldier Of Fortune Magazine. July 89" in my gruff soldier voice.
This was basically the first FPS game I ever played & it took me years to realize just how much that spoiled me & made so many other games in the genre feel cheap in comparison in... so, so many aspects. This vid was a really cool surprise & it makes me happy to know that even to this day a new player can appreciate just how hard this game fucks, lol. Keep up the cool work, Civvie!
@@nerddotcom5817 Specters who actually are hard to spot because you are using a CRT? That's why I liked the chaingun and plasma gun. Just shoot shoot shoot to get them off me! 😅
I have to say SOF 2: Double Helix was my favorite of all these. It took everything that was great about the original SOF, and multiplied it by 20. If you can find the platinum edition, get it, and regret nothing. I probably spent more time with SOF 2 than just about everything I’ve played. The hit detection is better, and the animations when you blow an enemy’s leg, hand, or arm off is insane.
From General Lotz "This shotgun sounds like the hammer of the Gods" to Civvie "The soundeffect for the shotgun trumps everything they'll use for the bomb in Oppenheimer", everybody loves it.
@@Elatenl that's something that particularly infuriates me about the new Halo games (among many MANY other things). My favorite part of mowing down covies was seeing the aftermath splattered on the walls and floor; and just about every alien had a unique blood color, texture, and a couple even glowed. The most recent game the aliens don't even really bleed, or if there is a splatter it disappears after about ten seconds. I get *why* that is for that game in particular, but come on. Seeing the rainbow blood paint from the aliens was half the fun.
Kingpin did it back in 1999 a year before Soldier of Fortune (also on a highly modded Q2 engine). Not so spectacular as SOF, but it had locational damage, realistic guns; you could blow off sections of or entire limbs and heads; blood sprayed, wounded enemies left blood trails... and the KPQ2 "Pain" system where enemies showed increasing amounts of bullet holes, blood-soaked clothes, etc by progressively _seamlessly_ swapping enemy model textures out in real-time as you unloaded on them. So for example keep shooting an enemy in the arm and their arm would first show some blood on their clothes, then multiple bullet holes, and eventually the arm would be blown off by the section -- or stronger weapons like point blank shotgun could remove limbs and heads in one hit. They actually had hundreds of progressive damage textures for every body location on every single one of the several dozen different enemies, and they were synced to location hits really well implemented. Insane for the Q2 engine in '99. KP's Pain system was a bit more detailed and "realistically" implemented than Ghoul, but SOF's was just over-the-top ridiculous. Also KP remains sadly obscure and is only remembered for saying fuck a lot, while everyone recalls SOF's gore. Those two games were the height of realistically modelled gunshot damage and gore in videogames. They also got a hell of a lot of backlash as this was the era of video game court cases and Columbine... So with all the horrible press we've seen less and less gore ever since. Many new FPS, even the realistic ones, are lucky to show any sort of blood at all -- let alone realistic damage on the enemy models and limb removal. Treyarch's CoD: World At War is the last one I can think of that did a half decent of realistic gore modelling and even that was nothing compared to KP and SOF.
Very fun game. Finally played it a few years ago. So funny that the villain is an Afrikaner nationalist while the magazine ran ads by the Rhodesian govt to serve in the Bush War.
Imagine Civvie when he finds out that SoF 2 is even more visceral, considerably harder (or at least I got my ass handed back to me above Normal) and had less sci-fi stuff.
The death animations in this game are literally still better than most games released today. I loved this game so much when it came out. It was definitely a technical showcase in its time. Oh, and that lean mechanic is absolutely crucial to playing on the hardest difficulties. This game doesn't mess around when you crank it up.
God I had so much fun with this game back in the day. I hadn't forgotten how amazing the LMG was, but I had forgotten how satisfying its weird lilting rate of fire is. That "BOOM-baDOOM-baDOOM-baDOOM" is so freaking good. I couldn't ever beat the last boss, though, so I never saw the ending until this video. I think my copy was bugged. I pumped every last bullet into that bastard and he just stood there.
Holy shit, how have I never played this? "Excuse me Mr. Hussein" is the first time I've laughed out loud at video game dialogue since the last Grand Theft Auto.
Unfortunately Soldier of Fortune is not the first magazine to be adapted into a video game. It was beaten by ‘Road and Track presents: The Need For Speed’ 6 years prior
Such a cool game at the time lol the limbs coming off was actually shocking 😂 blew my mind as a kid and thought all games would use that in the future.
Fun and useless fact, when Taylor was introduced my game froze so I had Taylor saying in monotone "Mullins" over and over and over again to the point that they only real memory I have of this game to this day is "MullinsMullinsMullinsMullinsMullinsMullinsMullinsMullins"
I asked about this game several years ago, and was surprised when you replied that you had not played it. I'm thrilled you finally got to it. Thanks for sharing this with us.
i can think of one magazine adaptation that predates this one: thrasher skate or die, published the year prior. a true classic of the genre of impossible to control skateboarding games
Loved the custom difficulty; you can make an unending horde of cannon fodder, 80s action film style, or a stealthy game that punishes you hard for drawing too much attention.
I only had the demo of the first two levels, but I remember using the shotgun to fully dismember, behead, and disembowel the already fallen corpses just so see how far this ultra violent game would let me go. So many discarded torsos...
One of the ghost companions you can summon in Elden Ring are Sold-jars of fortune, group of little walking pot boys who can explode and their inventory icon is literally "cool guys dont look at explosions" xD ... "Tell the others-tell them how brightly a fire jar burns."
When this game came out I tried to get my PC gamer friends to give it a shot. They thought it was a cheap game leaning on the Magazine IP. When I played it for them, and showed them how I could shoot individual limbs off corpses, they were in. The sound on that game was incredible too. Shotgun blasts felt so strong.
This, and Unreal Tournament, was the first game I ever played over LAN with my brother. My dad built us each our own computers when we were in high school and set up a LAN. Enjoyed playing the crap out of this.
You played the whole game and I only seen you knife one enemy? When I first played this game I ran out of ammo and discovered the true potential of the GHOUL system by carving enemies up like Jack-o-lanterns. While earning it a cozy place in my great classic game memoires.
ONE THING YOU MISSED - That you're going to want to make a short out of. Get the SMG, Stun Lock and Enemy with attacking from it. Continue to attack and reload while stun locked. EVENTUALLY You will be AMAZED by what happens *Not gonna spoil it for you, cuz youll love it* Enjoy
This was the first game I noclipped in, went outside the map, saw there was nothing outside of the playable area (I was 10 and thought there was an entire world outside of where I could go in levels) and the "magic" of videogames was gone forever
Man alive, I had lots of fun on Soldier of Fortune II, back in the day. It had a slightly different game engine, but still tons of delightful polygonal gore. Dunno if you'd ever want to review it, but a couple of highlights I _still_ remember, mostly from messing around with NOTARGET on the console: 1. Enemies were attracted to your flashlight, if you used it in the dark. (Okay, nice touch) 2. If they were standing next to a glass window that was hit by gunfire or an explosion, enemies wouldn't necessarily be killed-but they WOULD end up studded with shards of broken glass as they tried to fight you. (Gnarly) 3. You could club enemies in the head with the shotgun, and they'd go down for a silent takedown. Yawn, right? But...as I discovered, hanging around in the same room with some (again, while messing around with the console), this wasn't permanent. They'd eventually get up, groggily, and go looking for you. But this was after _several_ minutes, in a linear, single-player level, with little or no backtracking, like most or all of levels. So most players would be like a quarter mile away before random KO'd enemies would become an active threat, again. Ultimately unused game mechanic? Me playing it wrong? Developers putting in the extra thought and effort for a design element that almost no one would ever actually see? Who knows, but young me thought it was neato. The door gunner level looked pretty crappy, though. Literally. You're flying over the South American countryside, but the game couldn't actually render a lot of trees, so it's mostly dirt. Rolling hills of dirt. Under a dingy, hazy brown sky. And some really muddy rivers. Lovely.
I have some very fond memories of this and SOF2 on my PC made of salvaged parts in the late 00s. Played multiplayer against the bots a few times. Good stuff.
I fucking LOVED this game as a kid. I had it on Dreamcast. I used to have a huge stack of SoF magazines my grandfather gave me growing up. Big nostalgia
My buddy in high school had a windows ME computer (the horror) but the two games that ran smoothly were Motocross madness (wall Canon!) and Soldier of Fortune. The nostalgia is heavy on this one lol
Ahhh. Played this religiously at age 10, cracked by my IT tech uncle like the games in those times were meant to be played. I must've played the intro level in-game cinematic 40 times. So dope. I was born in late 1990 so this was my childhood xD
civvie never mentioned the fact you can use the pistol to shoot the guns out of enemys hands! They surrender afterwards! They actually put a fucking nonlethal option in this game and I find it hilarious bc the gore system is so noteworthy that many people will not notice
I practically melted the disc for Soldier of Fortune Double Helix I rented repeatedly from blockbuster. Greatest George W. Bush fever dream simulator hands down.
