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Riding on the coattails of Doom’s success in 1993, the world of PC gaming entered an FPS craze as a deluge of imitations called “Doom clones” began to hit the market. id Software’s Hexen, released in 1995, came into existence at the height of the Doom vogue and just before the genre entered its 3D polygonal phase. As such, the engine is mostly reminiscent of Doom, though it has been modified to allow jumping, teleportation between worlds, and a basic inventory system. The inventory has been carried over from 1994’s Heretic, but the ability to travel between dimensions is a new concept and forms the core of Hexen’s gameplay. Essentially, you must use the portals to access various locations and dungeons, collecting key items that help you progress through the quest. There’s a great deal of open-world exploration involved. You might find a door in the second level that cannot be unlocked until you flip a switch in the fourth or fifth, or you might come across a key item that requires you to solve puzzles across multiple locations. It’s a great idea, but most of the puzzles feel very disconnected, and the lack of true in-game narrative means that most of these puzzles will appear to exist without purpose. You control one of three character classes, the Fighter, Cleric, and Mage, each of which are distinguished from the others by their weapons, speed, and attack power. The Nintendo 64 version suffers from a poorly designed control scheme and heavily pixelated graphics. It does support local co-op, and given the open-world nature of the game, it can be fun to work together to solve puzzles. But as a whole, the game underperforms more than it really should, and you’re bound to have only so much fun before it gets tedious.

After two years of planning and development, Jet Force Gemini was released in 1999, adding to Nintendo’s growing shooter library. What can only be described as a third-person shooter with action-adventure and platforming elements, Jet Force Gemini is set in a colorful sci-fi universe. The goal is to travel to various planets and rescue creatures called Tribals from their insectoid Drone captors. Of course, this is an action game at heart, so there’s lots of running and gunning involved. I love the duels in large rooms: you can duck in and out of cover, taking potshots. And enemies don’t simply run at you; they’ll throw grenades and hide behind barriers. Manual aiming is challenging and movement in general feels pretty slippery, but the auto-aim is helpful. It’s very satisfying to blast the Drones to gooey pieces. Lest you get too carried away shooting everything that moves, you must be careful not to harm the Tribals scattered throughout the levels. You’ll need to rescue them all, but you can’t do it in one swing because some of the Tribals in the earlier levels can be accessed only by characters you unlock later in the game. What makes this tedious is that the Tribals reset whenever you reenter a world. If you missed one, you’ll need to rescue them all again—backtracking at its best. There is co-op, but I use that term in the most limited sense as the second player cannot move independently. If your friend is O.K. with playing a rail shooter while you go about adventuring, I suppose this is passable. As you’d expect from Rare, the visuals and musical score are excellent. I have no complaints there. Overall, Jet Force Gemini has its flaws, but the effort is commendable and it’s still an interesting, fun shooter.