Nam for DOS is a terrible desecration of the Build Engine

destructoid.com:

I keep a mental list of kusoge I want to cover in this column, and near the top of them is 1998’s Extreme Paintbrawl. Supposedly the worst game to ever be created using Ken Silverman’s Build Engine.

The Build Engine may not get as much attention as the splinters from the Doom Engine, but it was, out of the box, a pretty great 2.5D ray-casting engine. It became best known for being the foundation of Duke Nukem 3D, but it was also used for a number of less notable games. Duke Nukem 3D came bundled with a suite of editing tools, so a strong modding community sprang up around it.

Unfortunately, Extreme Paintbrawl came out during a very awkward time in terms of compatibility. That is to say, it was during that point when Microsoft was trying to bury DOS under Windows, which is, anecdotally, the hardest era of games to get working on new hardware. It either works or it doesn’t, and despite my best efforts, Extreme Paintbrawl doesn’t. EDuke32 doesn’t seem to support it, nor can I find any offshoot that does. I’m not done trying to find solutions, but for now, I’m out of luck.

Thankfully, it was hardly the only bad game built on the shoulders of Duke Nukem 3D, so let’s take a look at 1998’s Nam.

As the name implies, Nam is set during the Vietnam War. With all the wars going on in the present, I’m pretty exhausted on the subject. However, if you’re unfamiliar, it was a war between Communist North Vietnam and the U.S.-backed South Vietnam. This was during the Cold War, so the U.S. went to great lengths to try and stop the spread of Communism.

It was disastrous. Not just politically but also for the soldiers involved and the citizens of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, who, to this day, need to deal with extensive environmental damage