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Introduction
Characters
Walkthrough
      Level 1
      Level 2
      Level 3
      Level 4
      Level 5
      Level 6
      Level 7
      Level 8
      Level 9
      Level 10
Screenshots

Download

This website is dedicated to HURL, also known as Slob Zone 3D, a nonviolent first person shooter designed and published in 1995 by Deep River Publishing. It was originally marketed to children whose parents would not let them play violent FPS's, but today has been released as freeware. Few people are aware of the game today and far fewer play it, but I was enticed by the game when I first encountered it in 1996 and I still play it today.

Storyline

You are a member of SUDZ, the Special Undercover Dirt Zappers. Bob the Slob and his squad of henchmen, the Hardcore Union of Radical Litterbugs, have taken over your town and filled it with trash. It is your job as the hero of the game to track down Bob the Slob and bring him to justice by giving him a bath =)

On your quest to capture Bob, you will find the surrealist levels you progress through getting increasingly messy. It is up to you to clean them up. But it's not so easy: as you try to pick up trash you will be constantly attacked by animals hitting you with even more trash. To defend yourself, you have to collect the trash you find and trade it for weapons in the form of soap and water, or use it as money to pay for a quick shower to clean yourself up. If you get hit too many times, the game displays the message "YOU'VE BEEN SLOBBED!" and you are allowed to start the level over again with hit points subtracted from the enemies according to how many times you hit them on your previous attempt.

The game starts out very easy, but the gameplay grows more challenging with each successive level. Fortunately the game allows you to save at any time, and not just at certain special save points. These saved games make possible even the toughest levels, like Junk Food Alley, which I myself have never been able to complete in one sitting.

Technical Information

The images in the game are mostly digital pictures of figurines created from modeling clay, encoded in an obscure image format known as GIF87a. The game engine, called the Adventure Game Construction Kit, which was designed by one of the members of the programming team for HURL and was not used to publish any other major commercial FPS games. The engine does not do as well on modern computing equipment as it did in 1995, and this game can be difficult or impossible for users of modern computers to play without the use of a DOS emulator such as DOSBox. The engine supports gradient-based texture shading, but it was removed from the final release of the game perhaps because it made it too difficult to see far ahead. Nevertheless, shading can still be turned on for the curious by editing a variable in the main binary file.

Although originally sold as a full-price commercial game, HURL is now freeware and can be downloaded on various sites across the Internet. I have had trouble downloading it from other sites, but the links on this site should work for everyone.

CREDITS
Graphics: Lary Myers
Artwork: Andy Hunter
Programmer: Ken Lemieux
Audio: Michael McInnis
Special thanks to: Tom Tracy, Tom Yamartino, Bill Gray, Erik Antleman