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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Cinematic FPSes would still exist without Half-Life, they would just give credit to whatever came up instead of Half-Life. The transition from Quake-style shooters to "story" driven FPS games was inevitable. At least Half-Life had the decency to give you aliens and some interesting weapons. Regardless of who came first, everybody points to the Half-Life series as the best in the genre. HL2 was really, really bad yet so many people regard it as the best game ever so it holds that much more influence over whatever pile Activision is pinching off this month.
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Aug 22, 2011 00:08
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emoticon posted:The second that game opened with a several minute long unskippable cutscene Yeah if you're too dumb to use the console to skip to the next map segment I guess? Space human being posted:HL2 was really, really bad [Citation needed]
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Aug 22, 2011 00:16
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trandorian posted:Yeah if you're too dumb to use the console to skip to the next map segment I guess? popping open a console and manually skipping something doesn't mean that it isn't there for 99% of the player base. It is possible, also, to express opinions without stating "it is my opinion that . . ." edit: also we've been having a civil discussion and disagreeing with each other the whole day without an outpouring of condescending internet bullshit and sarcasm, so let's not lampoon the whole thing with things like [citation needed] because all they do is lower the level of discourse and end decent debate.
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Aug 22, 2011 00:18
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Platypus Farm posted:edit: also we've been having a civil discussion and disagreeing with each other the whole day without an outpouring of condescending internet bullshit and sarcasm, so let's not lampoon the whole thing with things like [citation needed] because all they do is lower the level of discourse and end decent debate. I'm not sure how else you're supposed to respond to "HL2 was really, really bad"
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Aug 22, 2011 00:25
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mistermojo posted:I'm not sure how else you're supposed to respond to "HL2 was really, really bad" You could make an argument, and then support said argument with your own statements of opinion. I, personally don't think HL2 was all that bad. The weapons were pretty boring, and the enemies you fought were, by and large a nameless mass of guys in soldier armor. BUT it was fun because the vehicle sections were pretty novel at the time, and playing with the physics and all that kind of stuff was cool and new. I think as an FPS that it was really bad. Not a lot of action, too much plodding between blowing poo poo up. As an adventure game though, I really got into it.
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Aug 22, 2011 00:27
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I think a lot of people here are looking trough rose-tinted glasses. Hell, HL1 is almost a straight remake of the first Doom, much more fateful then Doom 3 even. Both games take place in a strange, futuristic research base where an teleportation experiment has gone wrong. The player survives, and now has to battle aliens/demons while also fending of (possessed) marines. Both follow a three-act storyline, where poo poo hits the fan in the first act, the player has to fight trough a more bizarre version of the research center in the second act (where strange, batshit insane weapons are gleefully used), and in the ends takes the fight to the enemy's own dimension in a strange and trippy third act. Nihilanth even looks like a strange cross between the Cyberdemon and Spidermind. Valve took an old concept to new heights, but they're intentions weren't unique. Remember, ID was trying to do the same drat thing with Quake 2. That game had weapons that were still pretty much the same as those of Doom, with a few new additions, but the flow of the levels is completely different from Quake 1. Q2, Unreal, Half-Life: all of them were moving in the same direction because the technology and know-how was finally on a level that enabled developers to do poo poo they were always trying to do. Also, don't forget that after that a lot of the great old FPS household brands went silent: ID and Epic focussed purely on multiplayer games until the release of Doom 3 and Unreal 2 (and we all know how that worked out) and Valve went off the map until the release of HL2. Other developers with different visions took over. Also, after more then ten years of loving aliens, stuff like Counter-Strike and Battlefield was a loving fresh breath of air. So, now the paradigm has shifted: we want realism, and old school run-and-gun monstershooters are a rare thing. Still, I think that Valve found a near-perfect balance with HL2. You can fight with a MP7, or you can use an army of giant alien ants. You can shoot men with a magnum, or annihilate zombies with saw blades fired from the gravity gun. Other games that find a good middle way are things like The Darkness (in which you can kill enemies in New York with normal guns or impale them with demonic tentacles, and find yourself in a completely bizarre Hell a couple of levels later. Or Prey, which has the most bizarre weapons I've ever seen and enemies whose aesthetic is extremely close to the old 3D Realms games. TL;DR : The FPS genre has simply faced an unavoidable paradigm shift, but there is absolutely no telling where we'll be in 10 years when "realistic" shooters will be considered stale and cliche. Goddamn, that was WAY more words then I intentioned...
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Aug 22, 2011 00:34
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Sobatchja Morda posted:I think a lot of people here are looking trough rose-tinted glasses. Hell, HL1 is almost a straight remake of the first Doom, much more fateful then Doom 3 even. Both games take place in a strange, futuristic research base where an teleportation experiment has gone wrong. The player survives, and now has to battle aliens/demons while also fending of (possessed) marines. Both follow a three-act storyline, where poo poo hits the fan in the first act, the player has to fight trough a more bizarre version of the research center in the second act (where strange, batshit insane weapons are gleefully used), and in the ends takes the fight to the enemy's own dimension in a strange and trippy third act. Nihilanth even looks like a strange cross between the Cyberdemon and Spidermind. Lots of words but well argued. I think you're right on about the rose tinted thing. I know for me I always get really excited about some game I never played from my favorite shooter period, and almost invariably it is kind of awful, or at least has lots of obnoxious poo poo in it. I remember when HL1 came out, and the other stuff around that time - Deus Ex, Terminator Future Shock, those FPS/RPG type games. And hell yes they were a breath of fresh air. I guess what makes me love the particular old games that I love is that the best of them were new expressions of "game" for a lot of us. I think we're actually at a pretty good place right now. You've got the military fpses, the weird ones (like Prey, which was awesome), and the throwbacks like (hopefully) Serious Sam 3. We've got a hell of a lot more variety in shooters than we've ever had before, which is always good. You mention something that needs exploration. Why, exactly, did multiplayer become the focus for these games? Instead of having tons of difficulty levels and running against your own times and things like we all did in Doom, multiplayer became the focus of replaying the game, and single player became kind of a back-burner shitheap with Quake 2 (and yes, I know, I like Q2 singleplayer also, but come on) and it just went from there. I guess it was probably the shift from obnoxious, difficult to manage internet protocols to really easy things like tcp/ip for connections to game servers, but I'd like to think there was more to it than that. In the 90s ID and 3dRealms and all them were really exploring new territory, first, and then once they had some ideas they exploited the hell out of those ideas to give us really polished, great games. The emergence of multiplayer to keep games alive came out of that same spirit of exploration, I think. I remember when Quake World went live, how my friends and I were totally blown away by stat tracking and all that.
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Aug 22, 2011 00:42
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Ok I found my Redneck Rampage CD and got the source port. Buuuut I need redneck.grp, tables.dat, and lookup.dat from the cd itself. How do I do this? It also did this when I just tried to install?  I'm on vista 32bit if that matters or whatever
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Aug 22, 2011 00:58
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MeinGott posted:Ok I found my Redneck Rampage CD and got the source port. Buuuut I need redneck.grp, tables.dat, and lookup.dat from the cd itself. Use DosBox to run the installer.
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Aug 22, 2011 01:02
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Half Life 2 was bad? Is the sky purple in your universe? Jesus christ, what a terrible opinion.
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Aug 22, 2011 01:03
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EightBit posted:Use DosBox to run the installer. I thought I was missing something 
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Aug 22, 2011 01:09
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Platypus Farm posted:I guess it was probably the shift from obnoxious, difficult to manage internet protocols to really easy things like tcp/ip for connections to game servers, but I'd like to think there was more to it than that. In the 90s ID and 3dRealms and all them were really exploring new territory, first, and then once they had some ideas they exploited the hell out of those ideas to give us really polished, great games. The emergence of multiplayer to keep games alive came out of that same spirit of exploration, I think. I remember when Quake World went live, how my friends and I were totally blown away by stat tracking and all that. Creating a good story is hard. Telling that good story well is also hard. Doing it within the small budgets that FPSes had in the early days was nigh impossible, and you had to end up with a product where the buyer didn't feel screwed out of his money. So: deathmatch it was, in its various incarnations, because you could focus the effort far better and the players themselves created much of the game experience, and they could continue to do so until they got bored. There was no "seen it all" factor the way it was with single-player games, or if there was, it was a long way off comparatively speaking. This split between DM and SP become particularly pronounced as the story-telling portions became more and more creative in what they tried to tell, which forced them to be more scripted and bound to a specific narrative. Compare this to the early days when the narrative — and I'm being generous here — was "find keys, kill everything else, do it in roughly the right order". It's interesting to note that almost all early games that followed this simple "story" template also had fully functioning co-op modes that let every do that thing at once, because all it was was shooting monsters and opening doors (cf. Doom + variants, Duke3D, Quake, Unreal). Once you wanted to tell a story with cutscenes and scripted events, that kind of co-op became insanely hard — how do you script an event when you have no idea where all the umpteen different players will be? I really only leave Unreal on that list tentatively because, while it did have a co-op mode, it also did break on a lot of the scripted events, and it didn't have a good respawn system so dying in co-op was loving painful (none of this modern "restart from the checkpoint with whatever you had as the checkpoint was activated"; back to the respawn point of the map, which may at this point be blocked off from the rest of the map, with the default starting equipment, i.e. a blaster and a translator). It's not until (I'd say) Left 4 Dead, and (possibly) Borderlands that we have seen the re-emergence of these old-style co-op slaughter fests, because it's not until now that it has been possible to create a scripting system that can deal with the kind of situations that co-op generates. So I'd say that a lot of the split between DM-style gameplay and the kind of exploration you saw in SP campaigns came from the pure technical and financial inability at the time to make both work satisfactorily at once. …and on a somewhat related note (the players creating their own gameplay), Doom will always and forever be the best game for the simple fact that, if you did something wrong in DeHackEd, you would end up with the game spitting out a "Professional Error". Pro errors = best errors, and that's the end of that! Tippis fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Aug 22, 2011 |
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Aug 22, 2011 01:12
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Vintersorg posted:Half Life 2 was bad? Is the sky purple in your universe? Jesus christ, what a terrible opinion. The weapons aren't so hot (terrible "gunfeel" outside of 2 or 3), the ~4 different enemies you fight are really uninteresting, the vehicle sections go on for way too long and aren't really fun, takes about 15 minutes to get your first weapon and the "game" part of the game starts, but mostly the unskippable not-cutscenes of NPC dialog that go on for what feels like an eternity and happen fairly frequently. IIRC the ammo was limited with lots of the weapons unless you were at a "Rocket Launcher Event" with a box of endless rockets but I could be misremembering because every time I try to give it another chance I give up because I'm not having any fun. What did y'all like about HL2 if you don't mind me asking? I'm having a hard time remembering anything good about it outside of the Gravity Gun which was fun to screw around with. I don't mean to sound like a jerk, btw, I just want to hear what people liked about it.
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Aug 22, 2011 01:32
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Space human being posted:What did y'all like about HL2 if you don't mind me asking? I'm having a hard time remembering anything good about it outside of the Gravity Gun which was fun to screw around with. I don't mean to sound like a jerk, btw, I just want to hear what people liked about it.
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Aug 22, 2011 01:35
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I think that recently we've seen a very interesting development, where the borders between FPS and RPG are beginning to blur. Of course first person rpg's are nothing new (hell, they predate the FPS) But some of the biggest RPG hits of recent years use the first person view to deliver a rather fast style of gameplay (Berthesda's games come to mind, amongst others) but at the same time some of the most populair online shooters are RPG's at heart: think of Call of Duty, where the whole appeal of multiplayer is to earn experience and level up in order to unlock new weapons and abilities. In my opinion, games like Borderlands could really be on to something, and that could be good news for everyone: your avid CoD-player can enjoy his addicting leveling, while realism is no longer a requirement. Of course, this is all just a wild guess, but imagine an online world where rifleman-class players experience a style of gameplay remicent of CoD, while on the other side of the map massive juggernauts roam around, shooting missiles and lasers at everything that moves. You could have both flavours of cake, and eat them too! Ah, dreams...  On another note, is anyone else excited about the upcoming Shootmania? And if you're not, why not kill some time with these reviews? Oh, Edge, you just didn't understand...
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Aug 22, 2011 01:37
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It doesn't hold up as well these days but Half-Life 2 was unlike anything I had ever seen before at the time. It came out a little after Doom 3 and looked great, ran great, scaled to a crazy variety of hardware, had a physics system ten times more advanced and prominent than its nearest equivalent, and communicated an atmosphere like no FPS before it. The art direction in that game was wonderful. Ravenholm was actually creepy(I had been recently disappointed by the ultra-lovely Doom 3). Every part of the game felt like its own individual component that wasn't exactly like any of the parts before it, except they still made up a cohesive whole. Did I dislike some parts? Hell yeah. The dune-like "floor is lava" segment where you jump around to avoid disturbing the ant lions was really stupid. Other parts just held up really badly, like Route Canal, but at the time that served as an awesome tech demonstration and even just stuff like helicopters dropping off squads of dudes who would then throw flaming explosives at me made a big impression on me. It was way, way cooler than any prior implementation of that. I still like how long it took to give you a gun. I wish more FPS games would do that. Run and gun shooters are fun and great and important to have around, but I have no more desire to see them utterly dominate the FPS scene than military shooters, or FPS/RPGs like STALKER or Deus Ex, or anything else, for that matter. I think that these are all valid and potentially great ways to make a game about shooting a guy. I don't see why any of them should be shunned outright.
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Aug 22, 2011 01:46
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Fergus Mac Roich posted:shooters, or FPS/RPGs like STALKER or Deus Ex, or anything else, for that matter. I think that these are all valid and potentially great ways to make a game about shooting a guy. I don't see why any of them should be shunned outright. This reminds me of yet another (self-created) subgenre: the atmosphere shooter. The first time I tried STALKER, I just didn't get it. It was slow, boring, and way too hard. Hard in the way I've been complaining about Shadow Warrior. I would walk into that first little enemy encampment to off some bad guys and die immediately. I had bought it on a steam sale so whatever, 5 bucks down the drain. Later, I heard of the "Complete" mods for Pripyat and the original so I figured I'd try again. Holy god those are fun games. Once I realized you weren't supposed to act like John "God drat" Rambo, I really got into the setting and pace of them. I think I ended up liking Pripyat a little more than the original because the pace was even slower and more explorative. Great games. Metro 2033 is another of these. At first, just totally went over my head and when I revisited, it was a blast. But no your point is spot on. We CAN have all these fun toys and none of them negate the others. By the way, have you tried to play Doom 3 again? I hated the poo poo out of it at first too, but when I went into it with a STALKER or System Shock sort of mindset, I liked it quite a bit.
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Aug 22, 2011 01:51
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Actually my very first run of it was with the System Shock 2 mindset because of those audio logs(not to mention the growth on the ship). I played it again recently and my opinion on it was a lot less caustic than back in 2004-2005 but I still really, really disliked it. With the first few levels I was okay, and as time wore on I just started to sigh every time it seemed to repeat itself. Same tricks, same-looking rooms, same everything. I liked Resurrection of Evil a little better though. edit: I think Dead Space ended up being the game that id thought they were making with Doom 3.
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Aug 22, 2011 01:54
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Vintersorg posted:Half Life 2 was bad? Is the sky purple in your universe? Jesus christ, what a terrible opinion. Depends on how you're evaluating it. As a "classic-style" high-speed FPS it's terrible; the weapons are boring, the enemies are monotonous, the levels are mostly linear, there are lengthy sections of vehicle, dialogue, or scenesetting where you don't get to kill anything, you move way too slowly, ammo limits are far too low to make effective use of your weapons, and the final boss is a game of skeeball. It's a good game on its own merits, and it was mindblowing in some ways when it first came out, but anyone who went into it expecting Quake or Doom or, gently caress, more Half-Life 1 gameplay (as opposed to more Half-Life 1 story), was bound to be disappointed. This seems to be a recurring theme: a genre label gets overloaded to mean very different things, and then people get serious expectations mismatch. FPS these days can mean high-speed abstract shooter, or gritty realistic war sim, or hat simulator, or slow, atmospheric exploration game with occasional combat, or anything in between - and if FPS to you means one of these things in specific, picking up a new FPS that turns out to be one of the others is an unpleasant experience. Same thing happens with RPGs; you've got your dungeon crawls, your plot/character driven things, your JRPGs, your tactical combat simulators that happen to involve stats and levels. (Fun exercise: pick a JRPG from the late 90s and see how many reviews excoriated it for calling itself an "RPG" but not playing like Fallout, Wizardry, Ultima, or Might & Magic.) Platypus Farm posted:...and playing with the physics and all that kind of stuff was cool and new. Maybe if you never played System Shock. 
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Aug 22, 2011 02:30
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I think the ironic thing about the shift to MP was that, in the end, most of the MP heavy-hitters are mostly SP games these days. The extremely high skill levels in most old-school MP games these days make people say "gently caress this" and go to play SP, whether it be a classic SP campaign (Quake, Doom, etc) or with bots (UT1, Quake 3). Why bother going into MP and getting torn to bits by some Eastern European/Scandinavian guy that's played a game 10 years in a row and knows every trick when you can hop into an already-made SP level set or with bots that don't know eveything, like item spawn times, and are actually fun to fight?
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Aug 22, 2011 02:39
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closeted republican posted:I think the ironic thing about the shift to MP was that, in the end, most of the MP heavy-hitters are mostly SP games these days. The extremely high skill levels in most old-school MP games these days make people say "gently caress this" and go to play SP, whether it be a classic SP campaign (Quake, Doom, etc) or with bots (UT1, Quake 3). Why bother going into MP and getting torn to bits by some Eastern European/Scandinavian guy that's played a game 10 years in a row and knows every trick when you can hop into an already-made SP level set or with bots that don't know eveything, like item spawn times, and are actually fun to fight? That's just sort of how it works though. If you look at them from back when they were new and everyone sucked at multiplayer FPS games what you say wasn't an issue. Now of course that's a problem because if you've been doing ANYTHING for ten years you're bound to be pretty good at it. re: system shock - if you mean the first one, I tried to play it in like 1992 or whenever it came out, and it was already really hard to deal with the controls and terrible graphics. If you mean 2, I played the poo poo out of that one  edit: although, again, system shock is one I keep trying to go back to. I still can't deal with it though. I tried system shock portable or whatever that source port was called, and it is still a brick wall for me. I can't penetrate the controls at all. The graphics aren't a big deal but the controls ruin it for me. Platypus Farm fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Aug 22, 2011 |
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Aug 22, 2011 02:58
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Platypus Farm posted:re: system shock - if you mean the first one, I tried to play it in like 1992 or whenever it came out, and it was already really hard to deal with the controls and terrible graphics. If you mean 2, I played the poo poo out of that one I meant SS1, which did in fact have a rudimentary physics engine, including the ability to pick up and drop/throw items, recoil and knockback, stacking, moving a crate down the hall by bouncing human skulls off it...good times. HL2's is, of course, much more detailed and sophisticated, but it was a bit nonplussing to see people raving about how you can pick up things and drop them again and even throw them and this has never been done before in an FPS and it's a revolution in gaming. quote:edit: although, again, system shock is one I keep trying to go back to. I still can't deal with it though. I tried system shock portable or whatever that source port was called, and it is still a brick wall for me. I can't penetrate the controls at all. The graphics aren't a big deal but the controls ruin it for me. SS Portable is not a source port; it's the original game, packaged with some helpful utilities such as VDMSound and DOSBox and some fan patches. The source code for SS1 was never released.  The closest we've seen is TSSHP, a fan-made remake of the engine based on reverse engineering, and that was never finished and has been dead for years.That said, depending on what your problem with the UI is, there might be a solution: - Need mouselook: the latest SS1 Portable comes with a fan-patch that adds toggleable mouselook. - Can't cope with default keybinds: the same patch lets you remap the keyboard controls. - Viewport too small: press '2'. The ugly borders will go away and the MFDs and other HUD elements will become transparent. - Text unreadable: increase the resolution to 640x480 or 800x600. Personally, I never had a problem with it; SZXC isn't that different from WASD, and looking around with the keyboard isn't too bad when you can still aim with the mouse.
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Aug 22, 2011 03:10
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The original Unreal had campaign co-op? I loving loved that game and don't remember that at all. Neat.
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Aug 22, 2011 03:37
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ToxicFrog posted:I meant SS1, which did in fact have a rudimentary physics engine, including the ability to pick up and drop/throw items, recoil and knockback, stacking, moving a crate down the hall by bouncing human skulls off it...good times. After HL2 I have a hard time referring to extremely primitive physics like in that, in Deus Ex, or even in Jurassic Park: Trespasser as being physics. There's just been such a sea change in the fidelity of physics gameplay since the pre-Havok days that any time I toss a flower pot and it launches at some hilarious arc, gets stuck on something, and starts rapidly orbiting a fixed point it just totally breaks the immersion in a way that the "man made of triangles" syndrome of early 3D doesn't. It's like having a fart button. It doesn't even really represent something; it isn't part of the gameplay and it's not doing a good job of actually simulating anything.
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Aug 22, 2011 03:38
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Yodzilla posted:The original Unreal had campaign co-op? I loving loved that game and don't remember that at all. Neat. With the Gold edition (the easiest way to get your hands on it these days), I think it's a bit more intuitive to get it started, but the problem of having to die and restart with your dispersion pistol when the map assumes you have eightball launchers and flak cannons is still there, as is the same (limited) amount of pickups as in single player, so it's quite easy to run out of ammo even if you manage to keep your weapons.
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Aug 22, 2011 03:44
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Yikes that sounds rough. Still kinda neat that it's there though I guess. Unreal was probably the first time in an FPS that I was amazed at the environments. It truly felt like an alien environment and the first time you stepped out of the crashed prison ship was breathtaking.
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Aug 22, 2011 04:23
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Tippis posted:It wasn't obvious and, as mentioned, it wasn't really well implemented, but yes. Iirc, you just started a multiplayer game, picked Vortex Rikers as your map and co-op as your game type. There are mods out there that improve coop so it isn't that much of a hassle. See this page for an overview of all the neat coop mods that have been made over the years. If you're into just killing monsters with a few buddies, there's Monster Hunt for UT1 and MonsterCoop (I think that's what its called) for Unreal 1.
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Aug 22, 2011 04:28
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closeted republican posted:There are mods out there that improve coop so it isn't that much of a hassle. See this page for an overview of all the neat coop mods that have been made over the years. And on a similar note, if you're into killing monsters with a few buddies, Tally Ho (linked in the OP) for Unreal Tournament is just about the best thing ever. It's like a stimulus overload, with all of the flashing numbers and animals running around and smiley faces popping up while sirens blare. And then you're chainsawing a Nali Cow to death while a giant golden Titan murders half of your team.
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Aug 22, 2011 04:58
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Someday I'll get past the slow pacing and actually finish Half-Life 2. I love parts of it, but there are some long, boring stretches. I think it could have been edited down a lot without losing anything.
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Aug 22, 2011 05:34
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Wikipedia Brown posted:Someday I'll get past the slow pacing and actually finish Half-Life 2. Honestly, I felt like HL2 had the perfect length. By the time I was getting bored of it, it was basically over. It's the last single-player-focused FPS worth $50, in my opinion.
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Aug 22, 2011 05:44
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I've been playing through older shooters this last week, to see what holds up to nostalgia, and here are my findings! Half life: hasn't aged well for me. It had some cool moments, and nostalgia was there, but it was a bit too much "crawl through vents with a crowbar". The AI in opposing force annoyed me to the point that I ended up quitting (also got lost at some point, had no idea where I was supposed to go, hadn't played in weeks, and just quit) but I no longer own opposing force and havent played it in the better part of a decade, and I never had blue shift. Half life 2: I didn't play this one recently, but I think the appeal for most people who were interested in half life 2 was the engine. The campaign was kind of like a "yeah, whatever, that was mildly entertaining, lets get modding!" This was the same as HL1 for me. Hl was really all about the engine and modding community to me. In 2004 the source engine was astounding. It aged decently well and was upgraded a fair bit. HL2 was a very atmospheric game, and I loved that about it. The gun action and enemies, not so much. The boat...well, gently caress the boat. Doom & doom 2: These games have aged amazingly well. I installed brutal doom and GZ doom, so I kind of cheated a bit, but the gameplay is more fun than most modern shooters to me. Straight up carnage without any pretense of story. You're a space marine, you're alone and have to murder demons and insane former allies. Go! Quake: This is pretty amusing. I never played this back in the day, but I'm loving it. It really just feels like doom, but with a story I can't even pretend to understand. For some reason I need to kill ghosts, zombies, fish, medieval knights, yeti that shoot lightning at me, dogs, and other assorted enemies. quake 2: Never played this at launch, sadly this has not aged nearly as well. The starting blaster is horrible, enemy ai is stupid as gently caress, stage design is awful (a hell of a million switches, bad platforming, and backtracking), and weapons are underwhelming and boring, especially since enemies are total bullet sponges. Lack of a dedicated grenade button is hard to go back to, too. This game feels like it's caught in limbo between doom style shooters and modern ones. It gives a plot and objectives that are basically fluff (objectives like "disable the strogg supply logistics train" really mean "get to end of stage"). I don't know why, but I get lost really easily in this game, and some of the puzzles are simple but frustrating (moments like, "I was supposed to shoot that switch from across the room, come the gently caress on") the "ammo dump" level is a great example of that. doom 3: This game sure is dark. I hope nothing jumps out at me when I turn the corner forcing me to quickly switch from my flashlight to a weapon. *repeat hundreds of times* Left to play: both quake expansions, both quake 2 expansions, doom 3 expansion, quake 4. Can anyone give me some feedback on these? I'm likely to skip anything along the lines of quake 2's obnoxious pseudo-platforming and activating a dozen switches per minute. Is doom 3 more of the same, or more action oriented? What I'm having the most fun with right now are the doom2/quake style of "clear the level in 5 minutes of frantic firefight action". Anything notable about quake 4? I think I've become impatient in my old age, and am not at all impressed with cut-scenes, scripted events (outside of a few really over the top games. I like CoD's scripted stuff, go figure), and slow moving "crawl through vents" style gameplay. Meow Tse-tung fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Aug 22, 2011 |
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Aug 22, 2011 06:39
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Tolain posted:Left to play: both quake expansions, both quake 2 expansions, doom 3 expansion, quake 4. Can anyone give me some feedback on these? You really don't want to play the Quake 2 expansions. Unless your goal is to witness horrible enemy design and horrible maps, stay away. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil is pretty good. Better than the main game, anyway. You might want to check out Hexen, just to see a game that tried something different.
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Aug 22, 2011 07:50
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Are there any good map packs for Quake 1? That was some of the most fun I ever had with an FPS, but I don't want to go back and play the same levels another time. Is there anything that's just like the original maps, but more of it?
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Aug 22, 2011 08:03
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I started and finished Opposing Force last night and liked it a lot. Felt like a half-life mod, which I guess it was, but a really good one.
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Aug 22, 2011 08:40
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Tolain posted:Anything notable about quake 4? I think I've become impatient in my old age, and am not at all impressed with cut-scenes, scripted events (outside of a few really over the top games. I like CoD's scripted stuff, go figure), and slow moving "crawl through vents" style gameplay. It's not too bad, there are a few plodding script-oriented no-action sequences and some backtracking, but at least they try to shake things up a bit while you're backtracking so you're not just wading through empty corridors getting bored. Like in Quake 2 you start with the blaster, but it has a charged attack now and doesn't suck too bad. You get a machine gun with a powerful zoomed sniper shot pretty fast anyway. It's a decent weapon for most of the game. Both the blaster and machine gun have integrated flashlights (take that, Doom 3 guy!). And then you have some classic guns from Quake 1 and 2 in new versions with upgrades that are added during the plot. Hyperblaster shots can bounce off walls, which is pretty neat and surprisingly useful. There are upgrades for most weapons, the most useful is probably the rocket launcher which can shoot three rockets in a burst and lets you laser guide them like in Half-Life. The dark matter gun is just dumb fun, but very effective. Most of the enemies are obviously new versions of Quake 2 enemies, but they work pretty well. Overall, I liked it. The stroggification sequence is hilariously gruesome. Plus, Peter Stormare voice-acts one of the characters! KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Aug 22, 2011 |
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Aug 22, 2011 09:21
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Tolain posted:Quake: , quake 2: To be fair - both of these games were all about multiplayer when they launched. Quake 1 had a fantastic singleplayer as well, with ultraviolence, good enemies, cool level design etc. but the most important thing was that it set the high standard for multiplayer deathmatches (it's still alive today). Quake 2 had an incredible multiplayer mode and I would be surprised if any of my friends at the time even got into half of the singleplayer campaign - it was nothing special while the multiplayer was a fantastic easy-to-learn-hard-to-master experience. In fact multiplayer overwhelmed the game so much that in the next title - Quake 3 - id resigned from creating a singleplayer campaign altogether and the game played like a graphically upgraded (and tweaked) version of Quake 2 multiplayer. So what I'm trying to say here is that judging these 2 titles by singleplayer alone misses the actual point of why they're classics. Mutliplayer modes in both of them are still spectacular (albeit completely different from eachother) even today.
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Aug 22, 2011 13:37
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Now that I've gotten all of ID's games which should I play through first? Also Which DOOM has the most content? FINAL DOOM or The Ultimate DOOM?
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Aug 22, 2011 13:46
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MounerKT posted:Now that I've gotten all of ID's games which should I play through first? Play them in chronological order. Starting with Commander Keen. Ideally, you should play Hovertank 3-D, Catacombs 3-D, and Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion as well. As for Final Doom vs. Ultimate Doom, Final consists of two complete new 32-level campaigns for Doom 2 that are hard as balls in places and a lot more uneven in quality than the original levels. Ultimate adds a fourth hard-as-balls episode to the original Doom. Honestly, none of the expansion packs for any id game are must-plays, the vanilla games are so much better. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Aug 22, 2011 |
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Aug 22, 2011 13:54
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KozmoNaut posted:Final consists of two complete new 32-level campaigns for Doom 2 that are hard as balls in places and a lot more uneven in quality than the original levels. I rather enjoyed TNT Evilution. I think he should give that one a try at least. I had to slog through Plutonia because I found it so boring and awful. I think the only enjoyable map in that game is Go 2 It and even then it's a gimmick map with like a dozen Cyberdemons and a is secret level anyway.
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Aug 22, 2011 13:57
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Palpek posted:To be fair - both of these games were all about multiplayer when they launched. Quake 1 had a fantastic singleplayer as well, with ultraviolence, good enemies, cool level design etc. but the most important thing was that it set the high standard for multiplayer deathmatches (it's still alive today). Quake 2 had an incredible multiplayer mode and I would be surprised if any of my friends at the time even got into half of the singleplayer campaign - it was nothing special while the multiplayer was a fantastic easy-to-learn-hard-to-master experience. In fact multiplayer overwhelmed the game so much that in the next title - Quake 3 - id resigned from creating a singleplayer campaign altogether and the game played like a graphically upgraded (and tweaked) version of Quake 2 multiplayer. I would argue that the multiplayer in Quake 1 felt tacked on, and didn't actually take off until QuakeWorld made it possible for people to not jump into lava on accident if they happened to be playing outside of a LAN environment (or a college T1). The weapon progression was obviously based on the single player experience, with a number of guns being mostly useless in DM (see Nailgun and Super Nailgun). As for Quake 2, that game didn't even come with multi-player maps originally. Not until a point release months after launch did they release the q2dm? maps. And then there was the netcode that was tied directly to framerate on the client, leaving HPBs playing at 20 frames per second. It was awful at multi-player, really. My friends and I went right back to playing QW Team Fortress after playing Q2 multi-player for about a day. Not until RA2 came along did we go back to Q2. This is not to say that both games didn't have a huge multi-player following (and as you state, folks are still playing Quake 1 (QW rather) today, but they were certainly more focused on single player from a technology and design perspective. I think Quake 3 was all about multi-player only because Carmack wanted to make a game that was "all about multi-player" for once. I want to say there is even an interview with him talking about Q3's lack of a "normal single player experience" where he explains as much.
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Aug 22, 2011 14:46
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