Nemac 4
| Developer: Zentek | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Zentek | Sound: |
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| Year: 1996 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: First person shooter | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
6/10 | |
The year is 2079. A supercomputer tasked with managing the continent’s nuclear defence has gone rogue. Your mission? Shut it down. Remotely control a bipedal war machine to clean house in a vast underground complex, at the deepest level of which your electronic nemesis is preparing to annihilate the world…
This game bears an uncanny resemblance to Robotica, also known as Deadalus (Saturn, 1995), which I already found dull and ugly back in the day…
Despite a polished introduction and a convincing game engine, Nemac 4 was quickly forgotten. Why? Its lack of personality. There just aren’t enough enemy types, and the small robots exhibit neither the flair (nor the blood splatter) of the demons in Breathless or Alien Breed 3D. The drab, cybernetic world might be explained by the fact that the game was made in Germany, where violent games were routinely censored…
Another issue: having access to all the weapons from the start kills any sense of progression and accelerates player fatigue.
Speaking of weapons, each is assigned to a separate key. If you’re feeling creative, you can fire them all at once and put on a nice fireworks display! Too bad I didn’t encounter any bosses to make the most of it…
I do, however, appreciate the level design (teeming with secret passages) and the little tactics involving remote-detonated bombs or movable explosive barrels (admittedly, they don’t go far). I’m much less fond of the bug that frequently locks movement keys in the pressed position, making it feel like you’re skating around on rollerblades. Then there’s the bugged doors that only open halfway, blocking access, and the robots trapped in walls that shoot at you while you haven’t the faintest idea where it’s coming from…
Another infuriating detail: the exit is never clearly marked! You know, when you’ve painstakingly cleared an area, you sometimes want to backtrack for leftover ammo or hidden secrets. Here, though, a random switch at the end of a corridor can fling you to the next level prematurely. Once, it happened in the middle of a fight because a stray bullet hit the button!
To top it all off, the heads-up display showing remaining ammo and health (that hideous red orb in the centre of the screen) could’ve been much better designed. It all adds to the atmosphere—or in this case, detracts from it. Again, the comparison with Robotica doesn’t do it any favours.
There are two versions of the game. The first comes on eight floppies and requires installation on a hard drive. The second, titled Nemac 4: Director’s Cut (Amiga CD, 1997), is something I’ve neither found nor managed to run on an emulator.
Here’s how to emulate an Amiga 4000 with maximum memory to use the highest resolutions:
- In the “Quickstart” tab, select A4000.
- Under “Hard drives”, click “Add Hard Drive” and enter the path to your pre-created Amiga hard disk with Workbench installed.
- In “Chipset”, check “Immediate Blitter”.
- Under “RAM”, slide all the sliders to the far right.
- In “Display”, move the “Refresh” slider one notch.
Finally, don’t be fooled by the early levels—the difficulty ramps up slowly but relentlessly.
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