Reviews
Game
Very few good things can be said for Operation Body Count. The game is so bad it's practically unplayable. It's based off the Wolfenstein 3D engine, but the so-called "improvements" only made it slower and more confusing. Many people give up on the first stage after constantly dieing to rats. If you take the time to learn how to play the game properly you'll find a few interesting quirks. Stray bullets leave marks on the walls, burning fires cause damage, the floors and ceilings are textured, the grenade launcher can actually blow apart walls, and there is a useful automap to make navigation easier.
Of course, these neat features were nothing compared to DOOM which had already been released by the time Operation Body Count hit shelves making it seem rather old hat. Not only was it lack luster compared to the competition but several flaws made it a tough sell to any gamer. The graphics are uninspired and don't scale very well which cuts down visibility. Also, the items are very hard to see. You can turn off the floor and ceiling textures to make things a little easier, but that takes away one of the game's few selling points. Damage proximity is very misleading--rats can bite you from four feet away. Unlike Wolfenstein 3D it's hard to tell when you've activated an enemy because they don't shout out, and you can actually walk right through some of them. Probably the worst part of the game is the mindless repetition. You'll have to fight your way through forty floors, each being nearly identical to the last. The final boss is a weakling who only takes a few shots making the ending totally anti-climactic.
Overall, Operation Body Count could have been a good game if it spent a few more months in development, and came out about a year earlier.
Music
Joe Abbati composed a pretty good soundtrack for this crappy game. But the implementation of the music was rather weak.. While the title and menu always uses the same music, the music of each stage is totally random. The game just picks one of the ten possible songs and starts playing it. If you die, it picks another one at random. No attempt is made to have the music fit the theme of each level, but then the level's themes are all nearly identical anyway.
Poor implementation aside, each track offers a nice foreboding sound that is quite fitting in the lower levels, but seems a little out of place once you get into the building.
Ripping
The IMF files were ripped from the AudioHed.BC, AudioMus.BC, and AudioT.BC files using DarkOne's Wolfenstein music ripper. They were played using Ad-Plug and recorded with Winamp. The actual titles of the music are stored in the IMF files and seen in parenthesis; however, since the titles don't fit the way that they're played in the game, I've retitled them to give an accurate description of when they're played. All the music is played at random through the stages, but the Title and Menu tracks are play in specific places.
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Body_Count
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