I hadn't anticipated how much Rise of the Triad would annoy me in 2023. I loved it in the '90s, and not just because I was a child with low standards. I gather there were adults in the '90s who loved it too. But in 2023? Well, there's a lot that I admire about it, but to actually play it the way it's designed to be played—without cheat codes, I'm guessing—is a novelty that wanes after, oh, 10 minutes or so.
But that's OK. This new Ludicrous Edition is basically a preservation effort on Nightdive Studios' part, and as poorly as it has aged, Rise of the Triad warrants preserving. Its first shareware episode hit in December 1994, almost exactly a year after Doom's shareware debut. It sits on a weird threshold in first-person shooter design history, because while its texture work and enemy design can hold a flame to Doom, it's otherwise heavily limited by the tweaked Wolfenstein 3D engine that makes it tick.
