
Dateline
1943, We’re deep in WWII, you are a U.S. Army Ranger
who has just been dropped straight into the center of the Third Reich… what
do you do? In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, you pick up whatever
weapon is available and fight your way out to freedom. So whether
you want to tackle the entire Nazi regime by yourself or join
up with your fellow officers to go on a multiplayer blitzkrieg, prepare
to fight of your life.

This was tested in both OS 9 and Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2). It worked
flawlessly in OS 9 and while it crashed in Jaguar. Aspyr has
assured me that
with
the ATI Radeon/Nvidia GeForce series video card that it does
work fine. A nice feature that has been built into the installation
of this game is an automatic search of Aspyr’s servers
for any updates to the game that have been made since its release.
Overall, the performance of this game was excellent. [Editor's
note: as a beta tester of this game, I highly recommend that those
considering
buying this game do so only if you have a Mac with a 733 MHz G4 or
faster and a 16 MB video card or better. Anything slower than this
will cause the game to be sluggish at times and, sometimes, become
unstable.]

Finally, we have the next game in the Wolfenstein series. Return
to Castle Wolfenstein (RTCW) is a first-person shooter that
sticks you into the persona of
a
U.S.
soldier
in the middle of World War II. Strategy and stealth are the keys
to this game. To make your way to safety you have to choose your
weapon carefully from the large arsenal of authentic weapons
available and choose your shot even more carefully. The difficulty
level begins fairly easy and steadily increases as you progress,
adding in more of a maze like scenario to the game in the latter
levels.
A big plus of this game for all of us who still remember Wolfenstein
3D, is that most of the weapons, characters, and features
have been kept from the old version and given a major revamp.
It also
gives you the option of playing an online match with/against
people over a local area network (LAN) or the Internet.
The
only disappointment in the game I found was the rendering of characters.
The backgrounds
and scenery have been so well done that the slightly polygonal
characters stick out like sore thumbs, unless you are a couple
yards away from them. [Editor's note:
the better the video card you have, the better the characters
will look.] Other than that,
Return to Castle Wolfenstein is great.

No bugs to report. [Editor's note: be sure
to utilize the automatic update feature in the game and get any updates
to the game before beginning. This
will
ensure
you
have a smooth gaming experience.]

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a wonderful update to 1992’s Wolfenstein
3D. While it takes up more than the ancestor's 836 kilobytes, it is definitely
worth the hard drive space. The sound and graphics make for a very realistic
and
exciting
game. So whether you choose difficulty levels like “Don’t Hurt
Me Daddy” or “I
Am Death Incarnate” you're in for a blast with Return to Castle Wolfenstein. [Editor's note: this game contains often extreme amounts of realistic blood
and gore and it is suggested that only those ages 17 and up play this game.]
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