Thanks for accepting this bounty! Here you can talk with other bounty hunters as you progress through the game and keep everyone up to date on your progress.

I did a quick glance at this last night on Steam. It looks very interesting.

Not sure if I'll get it anytime soon, but definitely adding it to my Steam wishlist for the next sale!

I finished this game back in the early '00s after the first big patch was released (the one that allowed unlimited saves). I actually enjoyed it quite a bit and felt its reputation for being horrible was way overblown. I started playing it the other day as part of the bounty and while I still don't think it's horrible, I don't think it's held up at this point. I guess my skills just aren't what they used to be, but I found a lot of the fights were way more difficult than they needed to be, mainly because of positioning. For example, I was going down an elevator and before I can get a clear shot off, I'm already being shot and with rockets. It took many retries just to get down the stupid elevator and required a bit of luck (or maybe a lot more skill than I have).

It does some interesting things though, like the mini-RPG elements where you can upgrade your character, some cool level design, wide-array of weaponry, and the idea with the sidekicks was decent, just horribly implemented. And that's really the main problem. The sidekicks ARE really bad. In hindsight, I should've installed the community 1.3 patch, which addresses some of the issues and if you play on the easier difficulty, it makes then invincible (I think). That's super helpful because I had one of my guys kill himself many times by just running into a room full of enemies. Yeah, I know, you can give them orders and stuff, but I found they didn't work all that well. I would switch over, but apparently 1.2 save games are not compatible with the 1.3 patch. Oh well.

The real question is: Did John Romero make you his bitch?

I remember younger impressionable me thinking that was the dumbest and least informative ad I've ever seen, lol