I’ve been boning up lately (oh stop laughing, that’s a perfectly legitimate phrase!) on the world of Hellboy, having used some tax return money and birthday book vouchers to buy Darkness Calls, Abe Sapien: The Drowning, BPRD: Killing Ground, The Hellboy Companion and the special edition of The Golden Army. As a result the nebulous mental space I use to store details of whatever fictional world I’m currently mainlining is stuffed to the gills with the big red guy and his colleagues.
This explains why when I read that an open source version of that old classic Wolfenstein 3D has been ported to the iPhone my immediate thought was “Hey! A Wolfenstein mod would make a pretty good Hellboy game!”
(Here comes the madness…)
You see, the history of Hellboy computer games has been plagued with bug ridden piles of garbage and adequate though hardly inspired beat-em-ups. So how better to fix the problem than to make some modifications to one of the most consistently popular and influential games of all time?
I mean think about it. Wolfenstein is all about running around a mysterious castle, shooting Nazis and stopping their fiendish attempts to raise a robotic zombie army. Could you come up with a more archetypal Hellboy adventure? All you need to do is swap out some of the graphics and bingo!
As for the plot? Well the BPRD sends Hellboy in to investigate reports of strange activity in the ruins of Castle Wolfenstein – rumoured to have been the site of experiments associated with Project Ragna-Rok back in World War II. He discovers an abandoned laboratory full strange equipment and inadvertently activates a primitive time travel device which throws him back to 1943. He has to fight his way through the castle back to the laboratory and get back to the present day.
Replace the faces in the health meter, add the Right Hand of Doom as a weapon, make the zombies look like the ones in the basement of Hunte Castle, swap out the bosses with Rasputin, Von Klempt and Kroenen and there you go! Hours of Nazi-smashing fun!
(You’d leave robo-Hitler in there untouched, obviously)
If I had the time I’d take a shot at it myself. Of course I don’t have the time, so I’m releasing the idea into the wild in the hopes someone out there is similarly enthused. Which they probably won’t be. But hey, at least I’m making an effort 😀
