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Not a big fan of Doom 3, but I do like that they tried new things. Like how they used light and shadows in gameplay and level design was legit interesting. While not a game I particular like, I would never call it a bad game. In any media I always think interesting things that not my thing are far better than bland forgettable stuff that I can maybe get an hour or two of middling entertainment in and never think about afterwards.
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Jul 16, 2022 00:41
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ToxicFrog posted:This sounds very true to the original, honestly. Hands of Necromancy, on the other hand, has you constantly spamming very slow-moving projectiles and praying the enemy doesn't make a tiny step to the right which would allow them to avoid the majority of your damage. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jul 16, 2022 |
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Jul 16, 2022 00:45
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catlord posted:I'm actually pretty fond of Lunar Apocalypse, except for the loving sentry drones. Probably the worst of the 4 episodes though, yeah. Same here. After a preposterous amount of time spent in Episode 1 (via the Duke 3D demo) it was mindblowing to shift from the realistic movie theaters and bars to FUCKIN SPACE. I mean, you start off in a little spaceship that's flying around--what a way to start the episode! There's Tiberius Station and Spin Cycle, and even a level with trams that actually work! And you still have the toilets, which are the coolest feature of any Duke level!
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Jul 16, 2022 01:40
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I like lunar apocalypse but I think Duke works best in normal 90s locations.
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Jul 16, 2022 01:55
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SeANMcBAY posted:I like lunar apocalypse but I think Duke works best in normal 90s locations. Yeah, same. A big part of the Build Engine's appeal to me is the charmingly primitive approximations of mundane locations. I genuinely find "Duke goes to a grocery store" more interesting than "Duke goes to space."
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Jul 16, 2022 02:02
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Duke is great and all but you can't pick up a pigcop's head and put it on top of one of those toilets and then flush it and have the head get flushed.
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Jul 16, 2022 02:25
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SeANMcBAY posted:I like lunar apocalypse but I think Duke works best in normal 90s locations. I wish there were more levels that sorta combined the two. Like the recreation area in System Shock 2, it's space-y but it feels like a lived-in place and I feel like that'd work amazing with Duke. Lunar Apocalypse is too military and scientific, a little sterile compared to the Earth levels.
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Jul 16, 2022 02:26
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Lunar Apocalypse has great atmosphere but the drones are terrible, easily the worst enemy in the game and it's full of them for some reason. Makes you really miss the back and forth shotgun fights with the Pigcops. Speaking of atmosphere I feel like that's another of those key elements to Duke 3Ds success. The gameplay and level design is great of course, but the juxtaposition of Duke one liners and the frequently morose, spooky or melancholy music is a really cool blend. Most of it is pretty downbeat, other then Grabbag and a few more.
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Jul 16, 2022 02:29
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Tangently related: How Duke Nukem II’s parallax scrolling worked https://lethalguitar.wordpress.com/2022/07/14/how-duke-nukem-iis-parallax-scrolling-worked/
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Jul 16, 2022 03:00
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MJBuddy posted:Anyone with Game Pass will also get full unlocks of every character in Quake Champions. I was going to say that both Quake Champions and TES: Arena are both free, but getting character unlocks is a nice bonus. Haven't played Quake Champions, so I don't know if it's liked or not. Arena is a weird pick, though. You'd think they'd have gone with Daggerfall (which is also free). Arivia posted:A slaughtermap is kind of hard to define, it's one of those "you know it when you see it" things. Generally, it's a map that throws enough monsters at you at once that you have to focus on crowd controlling tens or hundreds of enemies, instead of being able to deal with them individually. Many but not all slaughtermaps are very difficult, but it's not the only way to create super difficulty in classic Doom. Notably, it's a different experience from what you get in say Doom Eternal: individual enemies in slaughtermaps are easier to handle, but the overall design and numbers of them is what makes them a difficult challenge. Arivia posted:There's a lot of slaughtermap megawads. If you want something that's got big maps with lots of enemies but isn't precisely tough, I'd try Hellbound. It's not a slaughtermap set difficulty wise, but there's a lot of it in general so if you want Project Brutality to sing it'll give you plenty of room. I'll give Hellbound a look, then. I've not played any slaughtermaps in the past (save maybe nuts.wad), but apart from the level of difficulty, I also feel like vanilla Doom doesn't mesh really well with the style. I know saying that's probably controversial, but watching that Zero Master video, it comes off as being a slog in parts (not knocking Zero Master's run, mind you; I imagine running one of those maps on UV takes a lot of skill and patience). With mods like Project Brutality, Guncaster, Trailblazer, or Demonsteele, it makes slaughtermaps seem more appealing, because it ups the pace and makes it feels more frenetic, since you've got more weapons and abilities to work with. I think that's been one of my issues with Serious Sam TFE. It throws hordes of enemies at you, but you dispatch them pretty slowly because of how slow most of the weapons are. I brought up how the knife is pretty powerful, and you can use it to one-shot or two-shot some enemies, but it doesn't attack as fast as I'd like, and I want to chop through hordes of enemies like in a Dynasty Warriors game.
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Jul 16, 2022 03:10
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Quake Champions has a bad reputation but I like it. It’s a lot more balanced in the newer updates.
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Jul 16, 2022 03:13
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Max Wilco posted:I was going to say that both Quake Champions and TES: Arena are both free, but getting character unlocks is a nice bonus. Haven't played Quake Champions, so I don't know if it's liked or not. Daggerfall was last week or so https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/07/07/wolfenstein-3d-and-the-elder-scrolls-daggerfall-is-now-available-to-preview/
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Jul 16, 2022 04:13
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SeANMcBAY posted:Quake Champions has a bad reputation but I like it. It’s a lot more balanced in the newer updates. Yeah, I tried it again recently and is really fun. Looks and runs much better than years ago too (my only change was going from a 780Ti to a 1080Ti). It has a ton of customization options and bots are quite good for offline play.
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Jul 16, 2022 07:23
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Crowetron posted:Yeah, same. A big part of the Build Engine's appeal to me is the charmingly primitive approximations of mundane locations. I genuinely find "Duke goes to a grocery store" more interesting than "Duke goes to space." I liked bloods mix of off beat locations locations a lot as they were already a bit off bit, so the level designers I think could have a bit more fun with them , but honestly I really enjoyed OG dooms, this is a vibe of a place, but not really pretending to be a real location as well as then it was just pure game-play and atmosphere. Like there is a lot of pros to making a level seem like a real space, and depending on the game it can be a pretty vital thing, but for just fast past FPS just saying gently caress realism this level is whatever it I think often works really well.
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Jul 16, 2022 07:42
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It's weird that Doom levels are theoretically real places but they put the absolute bare minimum effort into it. It's basically just abstract with a very thin veneer of realism...there's no chairs, no beds, nothing related to any recreation, and work only if your job happens to be 'demon' or 'toxic waste technician'
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Jul 16, 2022 10:19
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TOOT BOOT posted:It's weird that Doom levels are theoretically real places but they put the absolute bare minimum effort into it. It's basically just abstract with a very thin veneer of realism...there's no chairs, no beds, nothing related to any recreation, and work only if your job happens to be 'demon' or 'toxic waste technician' See Jessica in HR for any issues.
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Jul 16, 2022 12:09
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dr_rat posted:I liked bloods mix of off beat locations locations a lot as they were already a bit off bit, so the level designers I think could have a bit more fun with them , but honestly I really enjoyed OG dooms, this is a vibe of a place, but not really pretending to be a real location as well as then it was just pure game-play and atmosphere. I've always loved level design that just offers the suggestion of a place rather than trying to emulate it outright, and I know a big part of that was due to technical limitations at the time, but with increasingly easy ways to create hyper-realistic scenes I think of it almost like when cameras showed up in the art world: why bother painstakingly recreating reality when you have something that does it effortlessly? Say something interesting about it instead. Get weird. Make impressionist deconstructions of a supermarket in 2022. Translate that oppressive sterile nightmare vibe of an office into a Doom level.
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Jul 16, 2022 12:24
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Yeah Doom levels don't really make sense as a real place, "oh we built a razor-thin zig-zag pathway out of stone over our hexagonal outdoors toxic waste pits. Don't worry though, if you fall in we left a shotgun and some mystical armor pickups down there and installed a button to turn the floor on one side into a big elevator. Hmm? Oh, the waste on that side just disappears." edit this falls apart in doom2 where "a residential area" was incredibly abstracted.
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Jul 16, 2022 12:34
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The opposite end of that abstraction was Downtown, and frankly I'm glad more maps didn't even try.
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Jul 16, 2022 12:45
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TOOT BOOT posted:It's weird that Doom levels are theoretically real places but they put the absolute bare minimum effort into it. It's basically just abstract with a very thin veneer of realism...there's no chairs, no beds, nothing related to any recreation, and work only if your job happens to be 'demon' or 'toxic waste technician'
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Jul 16, 2022 15:39
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ExcessBLarg! posted:In a roundabout way isn't this why Tom Hall was fired? He wanted realism, and story, but everyone else found the game more fun to play when it was inexplicably abstract. He was told to make boring realistic levels, which he dutifully did while not enjoying it, and then they decided those levels weren’t fun and somehow held that against him.
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Jul 16, 2022 16:05
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ExcessBLarg! posted:In a roundabout way isn't this why Tom Hall was fired? He wanted realism, and story, but everyone else found the game more fun to play when it was inexplicably abstract. e:fb
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Jul 16, 2022 16:10
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Volte posted:From what I remember, Carmack is actually the one that assigned him the task of creating simple, realistic military bunker levels because that's all the engine could handle, and Hall found it mind numbing and impossible to come up with interesting design that fit his parameters, so that frustration and tension lead to him getting kicked out. Then Romero came in with his abstract level design and complex geometry and Carmack had to rewrite the renderer into the BSP-based one we ended up with. Didn't Hall also write the Doom Bible which had a load of story etc. in it? Like with your buddies playing cards at the start of the game or something.
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Jul 16, 2022 16:15
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Convex posted:Didn't Hall also write the Doom Bible which had a load of story etc. in it? Like with your buddies playing cards at the start of the game or something. 
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Jul 16, 2022 16:22
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anilEhilated posted:No it bloody doesn't. All three Hexen characters have the means to one-or-two-shot the basic monsters. I mean, in theory, yes, no matter what character you're playing as you can one-shot the weakest enemies, but in practice the level designers hate using those and absolutely loving love irritating damage sponges like the centaurs, so get ready to spend subjective weeks wearing them down with one of your grand total of three different weapons
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Jul 16, 2022 17:05
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Doom 3 felt like the gameplay was limited by its own environments. They needed a realistic-looking base, which meant lots of hallways and tight spaces. And to make the enemies work as threats in that environment they needed to do things like make the shotgun suck and let the enemies get cheap shots on you. I still appreciate what Doom 3 did well, but only enough to watch a commentary-free playthrough once every few years. I think I said it before, but it's one of the few shooters since 2000 where the weapon sounds are great. I'm talking about how its weapons make chunky click and clack noises, while most modern weapons make whimpy little *chik* noises.
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Jul 16, 2022 17:45
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https://twitter.com/hemoglobinworld/status/1548004236788609024
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Jul 16, 2022 18:41
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They didn’t need to make the shotgun inaccurate. Other weapons around its class aren’t inaccurate like the rifle.
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Jul 16, 2022 19:27
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Is this Loss?
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Jul 16, 2022 19:38
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Rev. Melchisedech Howler posted:Is this Loss? It's those phony mobile game ads that look nothing like the real thing.
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Jul 16, 2022 19:41
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ToxicFrog posted:I mean, in theory, yes, no matter what character you're playing as you can one-shot the weakest enemies, but in practice the level designers hate using those and absolutely loving love irritating damage sponges like the centaurs, so get ready to spend subjective weeks wearing them down with one of your grand total of three different weapons -None of the weapons comes even close to dispatching enemies efficiently. The magic sword is basically impossible to use without being hit in retaliation due to a weird hitbox and delay, fireballs just tickle enemies, the ice projectile moves slower than you, grenades are thrown at a weird arc that makes them soar over the enemy right in front of you and so on. The "good" weapons I found were a shotgun that you don't get until the second episode, a tornado spell that gently pushes enemies and does damage to them if they hit a wall or another enemy but require pixel-perfect precision to actually do that and a scythe that fires penetrating projectiles at a decent pace and but suffers from ammo rarity. The trouble is once you run out of ammo for those, you're stuck with the rest of the arsenal. -You get transformations that give you alternative attacks but they also tank your mobility. Considering how much faster the enemy projectiles tend to be compared to yours, this is not a good thing. -As you've mentioned centaurs: HoN has its own spin on that particular enemy. In addition to original deflective bullshit, they get a fast shield charge attack during which they're invulnerable from the front; you are in no way equipped to deal with that when there's any other enemies in the room. -Hexen, for all its enemy-spamminess, gives you the feel you're vanquishing legions of demons. HoN's equivalent is a multi-minute exchange of projectiles with a trio of wizards who awkwardly shuffle around, accidentally sidestepping your slow-moving projectiles. The fact there's next to no enemy reactions to being hit doesn't help either. As far as I'm concerned, Hexen's biggest flaw is the level and encounter design, but for Hands of Necromancy, it's the basic mechanics of combat, and that somehow makes it a lot less fun for me. ... Okay, I swear I'm done bitching about a random indie shooter. I guess I was looking for a game that'd scratch the Hexen itch for me and ended up pretty disappointed. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jul 17, 2022 |
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Jul 17, 2022 00:00
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Pennsylvanian posted:Doom 3 felt like the gameplay was limited by its own environments. They needed a realistic-looking base, which meant lots of hallways and tight spaces. And to make the enemies work as threats in that environment they needed to do things like make the shotgun suck and let the enemies get cheap shots on you. I still appreciate what Doom 3 did well, but only enough to watch a commentary-free playthrough once every few years. I think I said it before, but it's one of the few shooters since 2000 where the weapon sounds are great. I'm talking about how its weapons make chunky click and clack noises, while most modern weapons make whimpy little *chik* noises. You are absolutely off your rocker. The machine gun, which does an alarming amount of all the work for the first chunk of the game, gently rocks back and forth in your hands while making soothing tok-tok noises and bullets are smoothly applied to a pinpoint across the screen. It's awful. I think the chaingun is the only weapon that felt good to fire. I really have a soft spot for Doom3, but weapon feel was not one of its strengths. -------- ^^ edit: Oh yea, I'm also a huge Hexen defender despite knowing it's deep, numerous flaws. That Hands of Necromancy title was total gobshite, and I feel bad saying that since it's feels like making GBS threads on some kid's personal project or something. But it really is bad, there's no reason to even play the demo. Serephina fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Jul 17, 2022 |
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Jul 17, 2022 00:31
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Pennsylvanian posted:Doom 3 felt like the gameplay was limited by its own environments. They needed a realistic-looking base, which meant lots of hallways and tight spaces. And to make the enemies work as threats in that environment they needed to do things like make the shotgun suck and let the enemies get cheap shots on you. I still appreciate what Doom 3 did well, but only enough to watch a commentary-free playthrough once every few years. I think I said it before, but it's one of the few shooters since 2000 where the weapon sounds are great. I'm talking about how its weapons make chunky click and clack noises, while most modern weapons make whimpy little *chik* noises. I’d say it’s more that all of this was limited by the engine. The tech struggled to handle large spaces and outdoors, so everything had to be cramped. The dynamic lighting didn’t support global illumination, so everything became dark and spooky. The shadow system limited the number of characters that could be active at a time, so hordes were out and a single monster had to be intimidating and dangerous so player power was capped.
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Jul 17, 2022 00:36
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Let's play a game! Guess which Doom 3 gun I am! kaCHUNK pheeeewwwwwwwwww poof
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Jul 17, 2022 00:54
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A.o.D. posted:Let's play a game! Guess which Doom 3 gun I am! everyone knows the sound of the best plasma rifle in the entire series
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Jul 17, 2022 01:00
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Groovelord Neato posted:It's those phony mobile game ads that look nothing like the real thing. Ooooh So this is like Loss for Android or something then?
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Jul 17, 2022 02:05
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Johnny Joestar posted:everyone knows the sound of the best plasma rifle in the entire series It is, but I think A.o.D is doing the rocket launcher. It has quite a satisfying kachunk sound effect at first but the explosion is naff.
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Jul 17, 2022 02:29
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Rev. Melchisedech Howler posted:It is, but I think A.o.D is doing the rocket launcher. It has quite a satisfying kachunk sound effect at first but the explosion is naff. i love the plasma rifle too much so i might be biased, but yeah there's a good likelihood that you're right
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Jul 17, 2022 02:52
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Rev. Melchisedech Howler posted:It is, but I think A.o.D is doing the rocket launcher. It has quite a satisfying kachunk sound effect at first but the explosion is naff. Winner Winner, Caco Dinner
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Jul 17, 2022 04:06
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Groovelord Neato posted:It's those phony mobile game ads that look nothing like the real thing. I had to look at the replies tweets before it finally clicked. I think the idea is that (if it were a real puzzle game) you move the T-shaped piece in the center so Doomguy can reach the soulspheres and the revenant walks into the lava, in the vein of something like Cut The Rope or Where's My Water. I also thought it was loss.jpg, but then I realized the pattern was off. There is something hilariously surreal about the presentation, though. It's like looking at a shadowbox someone made in the Doom engine, where they just picked four random subjects, but messed up the ratio of space when placing the dividers. - Anyway, I finished Serious Sam TFE. I doubt anyone cares, but here's my overall stats:  Final overall score was 7,167,800 on Normal difficulty. The structure of the game is so drat weird. The first seven or so levels are pretty straightforward in having you progress through relatively short levels (roughly 15 minutes, give or take), stopping to do the occasional fight in an enclosed space. Then you hit Metropolis and the levels get much longer (closer to a half-hour) and the difficulty level spikes. You've got the long alley with the bulls and the skeleton horses, and then you've got multiple rounds in the arena right after. Alley of the Spinxes takes away the majority of your weapons at the start, and then you cross across an open road to another multi-round arena. Then you hit Karnak, and it seems to revert back the style of the earlier levels, where you're traversing through areas and collecting items and activating switches in order to pass obstacles. Both it and Luxor are a lot easier for the most part. There's still some BS sections, though. In particular is the second phase of the arena where you have to gather the four gold ankhs, because they spawn in a dozen hitscan scorpions, while skeleton horses harass you, forcing you out into the open where you'll get chewed up quickly. The final stage has you in an arena where you take hordes of skeleton horses, bulls, and mechs in an arena, and for the most part, it's kind of fun because ammo backpacks and health flask respawn in the center of the arena, so you can be a bit more liberal with firing. That said, the bull section is where I died the most, because if you mess up a cannonball shot and get knocked back, getting all the bulls in a row is difficult. The boss fight against Ugh-Zan was...not good. The first part has you running across a huge stretch with Ugh chasing you. He doesn't move real fast, but you've got tons of mechs and bulls coming after you, so you've got to fall back on the cannon again to take them out while trying to reach the pyramid. I really wish you could move faster, because you've got poo poo coming at you from all directions. Eventually, you get into the pyramid, and you get what's actually a pretty cool looking cutscene. Then you go up to the actual boss fight arena, and what you have to do is use the launch ramps to land in the hoops to activate the laser in the center, so Ugh-Zan will walk into it. Otherwise, he just regenerates his health once it drops enough. It's not really a difficult fight, but mechanically speaking, it's frustrating in its execution, because it feels like you can't reliably bait Ugh-Zan into the center to get hit with the laser, and you have to be careful about how much damage you inflict, else it triggers his regen. The laser thing also feels completely out of place when there's been nothing else in the game that functions like it. I think what I read though is that on easier difficulties, you don't have to muck with the laser, and you can just shoot him to death. Regardless, I've got it marked as 'done' in my backlog. If I ever decide to revisit it, or I'm compelled to pick up the HD version of it or The Second Encounter, I'll probably play it on a lower difficulty. I've still got Serious Sam 2 and 3, but I don't plan on tackling those right now. From what I remember, Serious Sam 2 apparently gets pretty crazy and goofy with its presentation, while Serious Sam 3 falls into a lot of triple-A game trappings that bog it down
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Jul 17, 2022 04:57
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