Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate

Viii-ves ... fortes. (dun-dun-dun-dun)
Vi-ves-for-tes!
Viii-ves ... fortes. (dun-dun-dun-dun)
Vi-ves-for-tes!
Viii-ves ... fortes. (dun-dun-dun-dun)
Vi-ves-for-tes!
Viii-ves...

- for a full hour of mission time until you go insane, dump a bucket of blue paint into your dresser and glue a chainsaw to your forearm.

Fun fact: there is apparently no such color as blue or green or light purple in Games Workshop's color palette. Everything's either "blood-clot burgundy" or "infinity blue" or "bile-smoke purple" or "skullflame orange" or some other such nonsense. Normally I bristle whenever anything gets described as "for kids" but in the case of Warhammer... come on. Every corner of this game universe was expertly decorated to the tastes of twelve-year-olds, from the blood'n'guts basics to the chest-thumping machismo of every line of dialogue to the giant spaulders and boob-plates. Duuuuude! Totally bad-ass!

Now, if you can stomach that, the game mechanics turn out to be quite intriguing, at least from my point of view as a complete outsider to tabletop games, and the honesty with which the setting seems to have been developed, the lack of pretense of being anything more, has yielded a noticeable dent in entertainment, if not through Riddick then Blizzard's Warcraft setting, a pretty straightforward rip-off. The "Warhammer 40,000" variation especially, with its fascinatingly ludicrous "orcs in space" routine has had so many pop-culture elements crammed into it, from space marines to terminators to aliens to ... ida know, ninja turtles probably by this point, that it comes across as a more marketable version of The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.

There's little way to adapt such material except by playing it to the hilt, loudly and shamelessly, and if for nothing else than that 1998's Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate deserves to be called a classic. Not really a masterpiece, but probably worth experiencing for five bucks, as long as you know what you're getting into. Like so many computer games churned out during the decade surrounding the turn of the millennium, Chaos Gate was a hopelessly buggy mess which crashed as soon as you touched it. It was made borderline playable by subsequent patches, but as lasting testimony to the shoddy coding that went into it even the much more stable GoG version has crashed on me once by the third mission.

The gameplay itself is quite good. From what I've heard of the tabletop mechanics, it doesn't copy them wholesale but it adapted enough to make for a complex system of stats and probabilities governing a challenging turn-based squad management game with friendly fire, line of sight and other tactical options / caveats. Even little details like turning your characters in place received attention. There are some flaws, for instance some of the teleporting enemies and scripted events which often fall into the category of Branniganesque "surprises" against which I railed last week. A lot of work also seems to have gone into the scenario builder, which means very little for anyone playing the game as an "oldie" but the campaign itself was enjoyable enough thanks to your marines leveling up from mission to mission and your depletable pool of equipment. You grow to love your eagle-eyed gunner Maximus Badassicus in squad two and the heavy bolter you reserve for his use every single mission.
Here you go, buddy. I know I can count on you. All polished and ready to vaporize cultists for the glory of the emperor.

The graphics for their part are low-res but have held up relatively well. However, pretty much everyone who liked this game will inevitably mention the soundtrack. It's not just the hollow-voiced cultists moaning "joooiiinnn uuusssss" and "cooommme to chaaaaaossss" or the action movie one-liners like "the emperor orders you to DIE" but the music itself, which dates from the time when game companies still invested in good composers to create memorable, personality-laden soundtracks. Chaos Gate thunders into every single mission to the tune of faux-latin choral marches that just... will... not... let... up. It's an endless fanfare from start to finish. Not necessarily something you'd objectively want to listen to by itself (though I for one moved it to my playlist even as I deleted the game from my hard drive a decade ago) but within its context the music more or less raised Chaos Gate from a well-designed, poorly-programmed, untested flop to the status of a memorable if not exactly top-tier classic.