Nitemare 3D

Nitemare 3D
Developer(s)	Gray Design Associates
Publisher(s)	Gray Design Associates
Designer(s)	David P. Gray
Platform(s)	MS-DOS, Windows
Release date(s)	MS-DOS - May 17, 1994 Windows - December 12, 1994
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single-player
Media/distribution	Download Four 3½" floppy disks CD

Nitemare 3D (N3D) is a first-person shooter PC game with a horror theme, released by Gray Design Associates in June 1994 on MS-DOS and Windows 3.x platforms. It consisted of three episodes, the first of which was released as a demo. The full release came on two 3½" floppy disks and was accompanied by a guide to the game's thirty levels.

Graphics were very similar to those used in id Software's Wolfenstein 3D games, with perpendicular walls, and no texture on the floors or ceilings.

Running into trouble in the underground prison.

Plot

N3D followed the story of Hugo, from the Hugo Trilogy, a series of graphic adventures consisting of Hugo's House of Horrors, Whodunit? and Jungle of Doom. Hugo's girlfriend Penelope has been kidnapped by the evil Dr. Hamerstein for use in heinous experiments. The player must battle through Hamerstein's bizarre mansion, underground caverns complete with prisons and laboratories, and finally through a twisted alternate dimension of demons and aliens in an attempt to save her.

The first level of Hamerstein's mansion.

Gameplay

Rather than the fast-paced action of Wolfenstein, Nitemare 3D has a slightly slower, more puzzle-oriented style of play. The four different weapons (plasma gun, magic wand, pistol and auto-repeat plasma gun) have different usages—for example, magic blasts are especially useful against magical creatures such as witches, whereas robots are practically immune to them. Meanwhile, vampires take heavy damage from silver bullets, while shrugging off the effects of the plasma gun. Each level in the game has numerous secret panels, some of which were purely for bonuses, but others are essential to completing the level. To make this task easier, the player can collect magic eyes, which enable the player to activate a mini-map in the game's HUD and give hints as to the locations of panels, and crystal balls for displaying the location of enemies.

In a similar vein to the Wolfenstein 3D games, Doom, and the Catacomb Fantasy Trilogy, the player's face was shown on the status bar, and was a visual reflection of the player's health, although instead of becoming bloodier, the skin wore away, leaving a skull when near death, and a darkened skull when dead.

External links

• Official page
• Several demo versions of Nightmare-3D, playable online
• Nitemare 3D at MobyGames