Understanding Blood Monsters

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#blood #games #analysis

I’m here to donate some blood … someone else’s. I love this game, its mechanics, and its monsters. Let’s take a look at ’em!

I’m not displaying stats in this video as they aren’t available except for health (not anywhere I could find, anyway. ATARI!) which isn’t really worth displaying without other numbers for context.

If you want to check out monster healths, dive into the Wiki, it’s a great read:
https://blood-wiki.org/index.php?title=Category:Enemies

Chapters –
Intro 00:00
Combat Info 02:15
Hell Hands 4:46
Spiders 5:56
Rats 6:25
Bats 7:15
Little Calebs 7:37
Bone Eels 8:34
Chrysalid Pods 9:02
Fire Chrysalids 9:34
Axe Zombies 10:08
Bloated Butchers 12:47
Gargoyles 14:19
Gill Beasts 15:30
Phantasms 16:50
Hell Hounds 18:19
Cabal Human Forces 19:23
Cultists 20:13
Fanatics 20:33
Ackolytes 20:58
Zealots 21:16
Priests 21:36
Cultist Pointers 21:53
Cheogh 23:04
Shial 25:05
Cerberus 26:17
Tchernobog 27:51
Beasts 29:22
Innocents 31:08
Mimes 31:47
Tickets Pwease 32:09
Outro 32:22

Music: lovely game tunes by Daniel Bernstein, Guy Whitmore.

Totally banging metal version of “Infuscomus” by Eliserus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaf6X_7kxXo

Other:
Clips from Night Of The Living Dead (1990), Army of Darkness (1992), and The Mask (1994).

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44 thoughts on “Understanding Blood Monsters”

  4. Beasts have one other big potential strategy regarding their stomp: it does "falling" damage to the player, at least in vanilla versions. Not sure if this was changed/fixed for Fresh Supply off hand. However this means that if you have Jump Boots [which negate falling damage when turned on, they don't just let you jump high], you can completely shut down their stomp. It won't protect you from their scratches though. Also, it can be situational if you have Jump Boots during various Beast encounters or not, and to utilize the boots well, you have to have a good timing of their stomp animation for the most efficient use of the boots without draining them out [since they can be toggled on and off], but still. :V

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  6. The moment I saw the hands classified as a nuisance, I actually began wondering if this guy knows what he's talking about. For a long time I was under the impression that depending on the difficulty level, there is a certain delay before you can push it off, which on Well Done is long enough to leave the player near-dead. This is also what I remember from BloodGDX. And if it is not so in Fresh Supply — well, I reserve the right to believe that this is another thing they screwed up while porting. And I also remember being completely unable to push them off when using immortality cheat. A monster that can break your game even when you cheat. How's that for a nuisance enemy?

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  9. Duke Nukem is NOT, and never was, a "sex pest".
    The whole thing about the character being "creepy" only started after DN Forever came out. That franchise-killing piece of trash was helmed by Randy Pitchford, who happens to be a greasy, slimy, psycho pervert IRL, and it's thanks to him and his direction that now everybody thinks that Duke is like him.

    There were no references, no proof of the character being a "sex pest" in ANY of the games before DNF. The worst thing that could possibly happen in Duke 3D was that you could go to the titty bar and give the dancers money so they would show their pixelated tits.

    Honestly, it's really pissing me off that one of the most iconic and memorable action game heroes of the 90's is now consider a creepy molester because of Randy "carrying around a flash drive full of CP" f*cking Pitchford.

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  10. Edit: im on my 2nd playthrough of Fresh Supply and just learned the zombie pain sound cue from this video. I usually TNT or burn them down immediately but sometimes it's only possible to blast with projectiles and give them a chance to rise again, so thanks for the tip!
    Nice touch making the thumbnail resemble the delightfully perverse animations on the "Help" screens😊

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  16. Good coverage. Most enemies can be downed in versatile ways, but some are some serious pieces of work. Especially the flame bois…

    A few notes I'd like to add:

    – A bug in DOS Blood made it so that if you killed an axe zombie or any form of cultists and they dropped a life essence, you could gib the body and it'd drop another life essence. But you can only gib corpses of those enemies if they were killed by means that cause normal death animations (no fire, no voodoo magic for zombies, and no gibbing). So for the sake of cheese, the best strat was to get close, duck, aim up and BOOM with the shotgun. The mook would die, the body would fly upwards, and gib when it landed. That's 💯% and exploit and I bet fixed by Fresh Supply, but it's worth mentioning.

    – The cleaver tossed by Bloated Butchers deals spirit armor damage (vomit is normal damage), and at least in DOS, can also be negated by ducking. The cleaver hits, but deals no damage. Not sure it was fixed in Fresh Supply.

    – If you're close to Cerberus but not in bite range, he'll stop spitting napalm balls and blow out singular little puffs of fire. Don't be fooled, those can TORCH you. They're basically the same as catching a Hell Hound's full fire breath, so they'll ignite you for a very long time, and with no water pools around in the places Cerberus appears, well…

    Lovely compendium, Eduardo, cheers!

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  17. Modern games often lack stuff like what this game has : Blood is great because it dares to be a video game. It doesn't try to be realistic, it's FUN.

    The ragdoll physics of explosions are chaotic and such chaos = fun. In my 40 years on this planet, I'd the say the most fun core gameplay loop of any FPS has been on Blood and it's down to all different ways of how TNT can…interact with cultists and other enemies. There are FPS games that have better levels or better graphics…but Blood is the most fun.

    Alt-firing a TNT so it bounces from a wall and slides next to a cultist- and then seeing the pile of gore flying from there – it's just bloody fun.

    Modern games try too hard to be realistic. I don't want realism, I want goofy ass ragdolls, explosions and cultists.

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  20. My knowledge of Blood was limited to Civvie's series. I appreciated the humour and all that, but your presentation is much more systematic and clear.

    The fact that we still don't know about stuff like HP values shows how important open source codes are. I'm also very impressed with Blood's showcase of the power of the Build engine (or KEX for the remaster). Actually I'm wondering what the latter could mean for Doom since the newest official source port is also KEX based.

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  21. Nice video!
    Here as instructed to leave a comment saying you're wrong for choosing fresh supply and should play in… NBlood! Or NotBlood!

    DON'T SUFFER THROUGH DOS IT'S HORRIBLE.

    NBlood is more accurate than Fresh Supply. Demo playback compatible. NotBlood is based on NBlood, and has some really nice options (including the ability to change hitscan enemies to use fast projectiles instead, so they can actually be dodged, tweaking the rat hitboxes, fixing the gargoyle crouch bug, and restoring the pitchfork alt fire!)

    I coded the share keys option for multiplayer in NBlood and a few small bugfixes.

    Tip on fighting hellhounds: get close, and they will always melee attack, which is preferable to the flames.
    Also, try out the alpha levels pack!

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  22. Decent video though I'd like to point out some extra tips for dealing with enemies;

    – This is probably the most important tip for dealing with cultists: CIRCLE STRAFE! Every type of cultist won't fire at you unless they are looking directly at you. So if you have an encounter with a cultist take advantage of their slow turning speed. Once they start shooting at you they won't stop until you hit them with something or you run to cover where they can't see you

    – If you mash the use key before a hell hand grabs on to you it's actually a lot easier to get them off you rather than just reacting to the choke; Even on extra crispy. You can also manipulate where a hand lands so you can get one off you AND have it land right over your crosshair if positioned correctly.

    – For dealing with the phantasm the tommy gun can work just as well. You can even bait them to melee and tap the alt fire once and it's about the same as using the shotgun alt minus damage and knock back. Preferable over the shotgun? No, but still useful.

    ANYWAYS please excuse my geeking out. I enjoy when someone releases a high quality blood video (which is pretty rare as you'd imagine) and this is definitely one of them 🙂

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  23. Shame we have no information regarding the code, to be honest.
    I would be interested in how exactly does the hitscanner behaviour work in this game. Cultists are absolutely insane with their accuracy and reflexes.
    They do not seem to have the "walk first" bit of code like in Doom, for example.

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  29. Your narration is great, I think this is the first time someone covered all of the enemies of Blood in detail and I'm happy you did, this is my favorite game of all time and a great part of my childhood.

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  36. Amazing video, really love the little easter eggs in your lines, the consistency, the PASSION that surrounds this whole video as well as the acting and enthusiasm in your voice – makes me feel you've done plenty of Caleb impressions in the past, and I bet you do them really well, too haha 😀

    And also, incredible tips! One thing I really love to do with cultists is stunning them with the Tommy gun, then running up to them and shotgunning them point blank – preferably while crouching, too, much like how you do it with zombies.

    Oh, and also, gargoyles seem to turn pretty allergic against TNT once you learn how to bait them to throw bones and offer them a biteful of dynamite 🙂

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  37. Sorry for another comment but on the topic of the fishbois, one of the first maps in the expansions has some aquarium vibes. There is a big glass tube with a shark man in it and next to it is one of the shirtless "innocent" guys and a bunch of chains.
    Not sure if expansions are 'canon' or not but the impression I got was that the cabal kidnaps people and initially turned them into axe zombies but progressed into weirder stuff as they began creating foul abominations that mix man and beast, hence the distubingly human screams you hear upon blasting a shark man

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