Like most 3D shooters, Chasm incorporates only a vaguely thought-out story. There are different "rifts" in time, and aggressive creatures from the past, present and future are infiltrating our time. You must attack and kill these "time strikers" and investigate what is going on. Translation: you walk around basic levels killing everything in sight solving puzzles no harder than pushing the right buttons to open doors. Before each mission, a funny-looking commander briefs you. These sequences usually involve watching two animated people talk and can't quite match up to the high-quality FMVs out there today. The most commendable aspect of the game is the monsters. Chasm has 16 original enemies from various time periods. These range from basic scorpions to alien captains. There are also 4 masters: the Sarcophagus, who has a surgically implanted chainsaw arm and rocket launcher, the Phantom (two swords and a fireball), a Sphinx and a Time Judge. Another interesting aspect about the enemies is that different parts of their anatomy will fly off as you fire at them (get your mind out of the gutter, not those parts). Arms and heads will fly different directions during the heat of the battle, depending on where they are shot. Enemies have a descent polygon count, smooth animations, and are pretty original in concept. At 640-by-480, the maximum available resolution, Chasm looks attractive enough, though not nearly as lavish as GLQuake or even Jedi Knight. Support for 3Dfx-based cards or even Direct3D would help. Overall, it’s just too bad Chasm wasn’t released a year before it came out—in 1996 at the time of Quake, it would have proved a worthy challenger to the 3-D action throne. It is a pity that the developers took months to find a publisher, and months more to complete it. As it stands, Chasm is just a poor man’s Quake that would be a must-buy if Quake and its brethren were never made. Enjoyable, but there are many better FPS out there—recommended only if you have played every other FPS on the market ;)
In an attempt to bring Chasm out of the shadows, apparently there is now a nice little Chasm Wiki at www.chasmtherift.wikia.com . Its in its early stages, as it has just arrived a few days ago. Perhaps if it could get some love? The wiki has a pretty simple layout, similar to all wikis, and no doubt with some work it could get the needed requirements for the Wiki Spotlight. Basic 100 non stub articles. Theres plenty of stuff to write about from the game, and probally just enough to fil past the stub mark. So, not really any news about the game itself, but on the small fan community.
This is the full version of Chasm: The Rift with various fixes/patches from all around the internet to make it as pleasent a DOSBox experience as possible...
New in this release: Net game improvement Minor graphics improvement and bug fixes Some game logic fixes all you need to do is paste the CSM.bin to the...
3 New Levels/Monsters & TCPIP Patch for Chasm. Was donwloaded from the original site.
Patch for Chasm upgrades to version 1.0.4. This patch fixes some mouse control problems and DOS clock problem.
New in this release: Invisibility Textures filtering Some game physics fixes Perspective type setting Some actions added for F1-F12 keys
A compilation of my first 4 levels. Worth checking out if you like this game with addons.
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Bought a Doom 1 game,and Chasm was the other CD in the double case. For it's time,Chasm was a good atmospheric game to play.Although my experience in playing vid games was relatively new at that time.
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Some dude is making another source port, pretty good progress so far:
Github.com
Doomworld.com
I remember there was a reverse-engineered source port last updated 3 years ago
Github.com
Whoever thought that was an acceptable game summary needs to be burned alive.
Is this game even moddable? Were there tools released for it?
Unfortunately not. There is a map editor (which ***** up the files and requires hex editing as well as various other problems) included in some versions of the game.
The .CAR format is somewhat similar to the one used in the Carnivores series though which has been extensively modified by me and others and has two separate editors created by members of the community. If somebody wants to take the time to look at and document the Chasm file formats, it probably wouldn't be too much work to incorporate into said editors.
Great game, wish i could get it working again. This game was one of my favourites after the heretic/hexen series
Dosbox
You can use DOSBox for that.