andrewelmore this got me to actually play beltlogger 9 and i am having a Great Time. didn’t even sleep last night! oops. at least that means the game’s cool. still, i’ve spent years beating the “doom is a dungeon crawler” drum (and, less seriously, “king’s field is a mech game”) so this is the biggest bag of hot fries in the world to me.
there are a couple amiga games in this vein, too, though not exactly on purpose; even the fake wolfenstein-type 3d was very difficult for 90% of amigas, so the “doom clones” were always clunky in the way one might intend a mech game to be. plus every 90s Amiga devotee had Dungeon Master brain the way the Genki crew had Wizardry+King’s Field brain, so the levels are hella DRPG and there’s weird “simulation” leftovers like taking damage when you bump into walls in Citadel.
for ex, behind the iron gate from 1995, which is sorta half wolf3d, half dungeon master, with mechs in space:
it’s not beautiful, but thats what you had to do to make One Of These run on A500. and it’s got armor and money and Hand Mechanics and stuff so they were clearly thinking “fps-rpg.” funnily it has the same publisher as Citadel and came out the same year, but was done by a totally different team. shout out to poland, i guess
there is also the trapped series, the third game in which has the “mech on space station” theme… though it never came out, and the only thing that exists in public is a coverdisk tech demo. it would have been One Of These if they’d finished it, though!
personally i am going to be boring and call these “station crawlers.” very dry, deemphasizes the mech part, but i think it gets at the meat of it (realtime dcrawl with space theme) - plus funny double entendre wot with half of them being on psx. “speclunker” will stay in rotation, though.
