User:Soap/HURL

HURL is a first-person shooter game released in 1995 as part of a brief trend of nonviolent FPS's designed to appeal to children whose parents would not let them buy bloody FPS games.

Story
Bob the Slob has stolen the world's supply of clean underwear. It is your job as the hero of the game to get it back and bring Bob to justice by giving him a bath =)

Gameplay
To catch Bob the Slob, you must first travel through ten levels both indoors and out, and clean up all of the trash littered across them. Meanwhile you will have to fend off the attacks of cute but messy animals who throw more trash at you. You do this by trading the money you collect from picking up trash for weapons: soap, water, and deodorant, with which you try to hit the animals before they can hit you. If you get hit too many times, the game displays the message "YOU'VE BEEN SLOBBED!" and you are allowed to start the level over again with hit points subtracted from the enemies according to how many times you hit them on your previous attempt. However, you also lose all your weapons and money. Fortunately, you can save the game at any point, and restoring a saved game will also restore the weapons and money you had with you when you saved it.

Technical Information
The game was created with its own engine, the Adventure Game Construction Kit, which was designed by one of the members of the programming team for HURL and was not used to publish any other major commercial FPS games. The engine does not do as well on modern computing equipment as it did in 1995, and this game can be difficult or impossible for users of modern computers to play without the use of a DOS emulator such as DOSBox.

The images in the game are mostly digital pictures of figurines created from modeling clay. The image format used is the obscure GIF87a.

Review Scores
 GRAPHICS --- 83%         SOUND   -- 88%          MUSIC   -- 91%          GAMEPLAY --- 86%         INTEREST --- 85%         Coming Soon Magazine, Issue 3.

Trivia
This game was originally intended to have texture shading, but it was removed from the final release of the game perhaps because it made it too difficult to see.

Credits
Graphics: Lary Myers   Artwork: Andy Hunter   Programmer: Ken Lemieux   Audio: Michael McInnis   Special thanks to: Tom Tracy, Tom Yamartino, Bill Gray, Erik Antleman  