|
Keiya posted:A friend and I discussed this... and health boosts probably are actually the best thing for most of them. On the other hand, we were also talking about having your health drain at all times (easier difficulties have a point at which this stops, higher difficulties don't :P), killing enemies giving you a bit of health, and having your health be a measure of how Dukey you're being. This changes the flow from "slog through enemies, hide behind a wall" to "Oh poo poo I'm out of things to kill to keep my health up... but wait there's a strip club up ahead!" It's still very barebones compared to what DN3D did with interacting with the environment and exploring. A health boost may be fine in the context of the game, but it's pretty boring compared to what happened in DN3D when you interacted with the environment. In Hotel Hell, blowing up a single wall would destroy about 1/4 of the walls on the second floor of the hotel, kill any enemies near the walls, give you an escape route, and expose a small Atomic Health cache. In Hollywood Holocaust, hitting a switch would move the curtains in a movie theater, exposing a crack in the center of the screen. Blowing up the screen would reveal a secret room with a Jetpack, which you can use to get to the exit without having to take the intended path to it. In DNF, the most you can do is...play a lovely pinball game for a slight health boost.
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2013 22:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 8, 2024 05:31 |
|
|
Irish Taxi Driver posted:Painkiller has it a very little bit, but if you're getting hit in Painkiller then you're bad. This is true. I don't think I've ever played a FPS where I tried to jump constantly to get more and more speed. It was hilarious that at some point you're like Flash blasting enemies with the shotgun, impaling them and with some practice you can even use them as jumping pads to avoid taking damage.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2013 22:21
|
|
|
I hope the new Shadow Warrior will be good. DNF was horseshit and ROTT 2013 was okay but mostly frustrating. I mean, I already pre-ordered it thanks to TotalBiscuit's WTF Is video and the fact that I had a Steam Coupon for it. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2013 22:30
|
|
|
Serious Sam is the guy you want to marry. Just hear me out. Other guys do it better, for sure. And Sam himself has some flaws. But where are all those other guys now? Where are Duke, Caleb, Painkiller guy, or for that matter Doom Guy or Quake Guy? Sam's been going pretty strong for four games now, plus two HD remakes. Serious Sam 2 was something of a misstep, but still eminently playable. Duke only managed one good shooter. Caleb did one. Painkiller guy did one. Doom guy and Quake Guy are complicated, but I'd put Doom Guy on four (1, 2, Final Doom, Doom 64) so above Sam, but Quake Guy as he existed in quake 1 only has one game, which is the best of any of the quake named games. The point is that Sam will be there for you. He still is there for you. He's consistent. His guns are consistent. The first game pretty much had the doom's weapons, with the addition of a tommygun and the BFG replaced with an entertaining pirate cannon. Later games added some other old standbys, the chainsaw, the sniper rifle, the C4, the flamethrower. All good choices. All the guns felt pretty good too. Not the best in sound terms, but they fit in with the fun atmosphere of the games and in all cases gibbed enemies satisfyingly. Not as explosive an arsenal as Duke's, not as entertainingly twisted as Caleb's, not as inventive as painkiller's. But nothing to complain about either. His enemies, the same. Like the guns they straddle a line between serious and silly. Big eye guys who punch you, headless guys with magic guns, screamy headless suicide guys, charging bulls, screamy harpies, scorpion minigun men, biomech monsters, etc, etc. They're entertainingly designed, they have variants, they have fun stories behind them. Most importantly, they explode in a satisfying manner that only gets better as the series goes on. Sam 3 (BFE) adds some gruesome melee fatalities to the mix, some of which put brutal doom to shame. It's fun, not frustrating to fight these guys. There isn't anything as annoying as the pain elementals from doom, and the suicide guys are nowhere near as bad as the drones from Duke. There's an exception though. The Kleer. I loving hate these guys. These are Sam's biggest mistake. They're fast, they turn up in hordes, they soak up bullets, they do a shitload of melee damage and they have a ranged projectile. They're just not fun to fight in the same way the other enemies are, but they're used so regularly. Add in the fact they're made of bones so they don't respond to damage in the same satisfying way the other enemies do, and it's a recipe for an annoying snoozefest of an enemy. I'll cover Sam 2. Everyone stumbles at some point in life. Everyone makes a mistake. Serious Sam 2 was a mistake. The developers went hog wild with their new, bigger budget. They cut the beloved netscrisa feature. They added vehicle segments. They changed the weapons to be kind of weird. The humour just got flat out retarded. But it wasn't a bad game. It was annoying in ways, but it was still solid and playable. It just wasn't as good as the first two sams. It was nowhere near Duke Nukem Forever, or Blood 2. It didn't radically depart from the beloved gameplay of its predecessors in the way Doom 3 did. It's a 60-70% game (in a real 0-100% rating system, not the 70-100% rating system magazines use) when the other games are solid 80%s. Maybe the way I talk about Sam in comparative terms make him sound like a middle of the road, mediocre man of action. In some ways that is true, Sam is very much a product of his influences. But he brings in some unique stuff too. Netscrisa is one of my favourite features, a pokedex of game information that updates as you kill enemies and find guns. It's charming, the entries all bring the character of Netscrisa to life and add a lot more flavour to the game world. All the enemies have entertaining/cool backstories, as do the weapons. It's a fun way to add lore and flavour to the game without having it intrude upon you in cutscenes or scripted sequences, which would violate the old school sensibilities of the serious. In my opinion the addition of cutscenes and removal of netscrisa is the greatest sin of Serious Sam 2. Sam also adds a lot of customisation to the experience. The difficulty, which is by default quite high, can be tuned in a whole variety of ways. You can have infinite ammo, infinite lives, and other, less cheaty seeming options too. You can also adjust the appearance of the game to your preference, in a similar way to Far Cry, by changing the colour balance of the game to make it more lush and colourful or darker and drabber. I'm pretty sure this feature is in the first two games, and not just in BFE, but I can't check right now. His levels are also fairly unique in the FPS pantheon. It's one of the few series to make the arenas truly huge areas. This is a good thing and a bad thing. It adds an epic feel and provides lots of maneuvering room. The areas look good too, they're vast egyptian deserts or lush jungles with lots of pyramids and temples. The bad part is that level design is useful for directing play in novel ways. Having a big open area really never requires the player to utilise the sort of strategy a smaller area does. Which makes gameplay less varied. The tightly focused arenas of painkiller come off a lot more memorable and fun by comparison, as do the free roaming mazes of doom. When Sam does take to smaller areas, it does come off better. Or when it uses large areas that contain a lot of variation, like the city levels in BFE. Luckily the large arenas serve as big setpieces in between more closed in sections, so they don't become really boring. Sam himself is fairly doofy. I mean it in a loving way. The devs are croatian, and european humour is pretty different from american or british humour, so while his character is definitely very informed by 80s action movies, some of his lines don't pop like Duke or Caleb's do. But that's OK. He's not an annoying rear end in a top hat like Duke is in Forever. He's never misogynistic or too much of a jerk. He comes off doofy and loveable. Which I think sums up the series pretty well. It's fun to bet on Duke, but you can always bank on Sam.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:11
|
|
|
I just can't get maneuverability down in Serious Sam games. I feel like I don't move fast enough and therefore I should be shooting everything dead before it gets close, but it doesn't feel like I can quite do that either. Help me, how do I play Serious Sam?
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:15
|
|
|
I loved the first Serious Sam game but got really bored with how big they made the levels. Sure, they were really loving pretty but jesus christ was it boring walking through an empty field for 5 minutes before getting into some action.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:16
|
|
|
I forgot to mention that BFE turns a lot of people off because the start of the game is a waaaay too long call of duty parody, when the game kicks in properly it becomes a lot of fun. I also forgot the great fun you can have with coop, with a retardedly large number of people. Aaaand I forgot to mention the metric ton of secrets to find in the games, which are funny and cool to try and find. Some are frustratingly hard, but not like painkiller secrets hard.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:23
|
|
|
closeted republican posted:It's still very barebones compared to what DN3D did with interacting with the environment and exploring. A health boost may be fine in the context of the game, but it's pretty boring compared to what happened in DN3D when you interacted with the environment. In Hotel Hell, blowing up a single wall would destroy about 1/4 of the walls on the second floor of the hotel, kill any enemies near the walls, give you an escape route, and expose a small Atomic Health cache. In Hollywood Holocaust, hitting a switch would move the curtains in a movie theater, exposing a crack in the center of the screen. Blowing up the screen would reveal a secret room with a Jetpack, which you can use to get to the exit without having to take the intended path to it. In DNF, the most you can do is...play a lovely pinball game for a slight health boost. The worst thing they did to the game-play in DNF was definitely removing the mighty boot Oh sure, you have your bog standard "melee" button but its a dedicated button , you can't be both shooting and melee-ing something you can only do one or the other, which severely undermines the focus of its functions in Duke Nukem 3D The mighty boot was revolutionary, it was the first time in an FPS that you could access a non-ammo based weapon quickly, and not only could you quickly use it without having to switch to the weapon but you could even use it while attacking enemies with what ever else you had in your arsenal; which made it useful in the case that you wanted to run up into someones face with a shotgun, or a pistol, or a ripper and keep them stunned while you shot them down to size
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:25
|
|
|
What was extra stupid about removing the mighty boot was that they still had a melee button, it just made you hit the enemy with your gun. Why not go the extra inch and make a kick animation and retain one of the most memorable features of duke nukem?
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:26
|
|
FirstPersonShitter posted:What was extra stupid about removing the mighty boot was that they still had a melee button, it just made you hit the enemy with your gun. Why not go the extra inch and make a kick animation and retain one of the most memorable features of duke nukem? They even had a kick animation, it was just reserved for "executions" (run up to an almost-dead enemy and hit the action button), which was something taken from Gears of War. Taking something memorable from Duke 3D and shoehorning it into a modern FPS feature is basically DNF in a nutshell.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:40
|
|
|
On other hand, the game could've been pretty fun if regenerating health were removed and all low-hp enemies were executable. There still would've been a whole lot wrong with it, though.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:46
|
|
|
My favorite part of Serious Sam 2 is that the entire loving game is covered with billboards advertising their ugly loving graphics engine that nobody licensed.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:49
|
|
|
FirstPersonShitter posted:I forgot to mention that BFE turns a lot of people off because the start of the game is a waaaay too long call of duty parody, when the game kicks in properly it becomes a lot of fun. BFE has an awful 1/3, good 2/3 and absolutely chore for the last 3rd. The whole Guardian of Time is a huge corridor filled with boring, frustrating and unfun waves of enemies with nothing interesting to do aside from running backwards hoping to not get out of ammo. The last boss is just a pile of poo poo. Serious Sam HD is the best pair, and once you get both first and second encounters on steam you can just leave the second and have both SP campaigns, plus de DLC is decent.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:51
|
|
|
SS:HD removed the rotating cylinder level and that's an unforgivable offense. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:52
|
|
|
Hey, Duke 3D had that impossible geometry level where you run in a 720-degree circle through a room. Let's see that in your Serious Engine.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:55
|
|
|
Serious Sam is one of my favorite FPS franchises out there. I've spent so much time with it that I pretty much know how to counter each enemy's behavior like it's nothing and I consider Serious Sam 3 in Serious difficulty easy. poo poo, I'm so HARDCORE that I beat Serious Sam Advance. It's co-op is one of my favorite co-op games of all time because of how relaxed it is. It's just a bunch of people laying down a ton of heavy ordinance on a bunch of monsters. It's completely different from modern co-op games; there is no revival mechanic no mechanics that try to encourage you to be next to each other all the time. All you do is shoot poo poo, laugh at how you died, get back up, and hope some rear end in a top hat isn't speedrunning. Serious Sam 2 is pretty much the worst for multiple reasons. The gameplay seems boring and clunky compared to SS1 and SS3's smooth combat, the vehicles suck, the humor never works, and the netcode is completely horrid. Yodzilla posted:SS:HD removed the rotating cylinder level and that's an unforgivable offense. I can live with a gimmick room being gone if it means more satisfying gore and better graphics.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:57
|
|
|
I remember liking Serious Sam when I was younger but I bought the HD edition and the whole thing felt like Guillermus posted:a huge corridor filled with boring, frustrating and unfun waves of enemies with nothing interesting to do aside from running backwards hoping to not get out of ammo. In unrelated news, I got my DooM shirt in today. It was a late-night purchase so it was a surprise when it arrived, but I was kind of thrown off by how dull the colors are. Still gonna rock it on my days off, though. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 00:58
|
|
|
Serious Sam gets its own Steam category on my account. I also have a category for id and Apogee/3D Realms. I liked Double D. Didn't care much for The Random Encounter, though.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 01:03
|
|
|
Once you get into the zone, Serious Sam's gameplay is fantastic. Large hordes that should make you poo poo your pants are casually torn apart, piece by piece.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 01:03
|
|
|
Oh believe me, I love Serious Sam. Kleers are loving awful though. They'd be okay if the games didn't have an obsession with making them the most common enemy you encounter.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 01:32
|
|
|
I like DNF, but you know what it needed? Kicking with both feet at the same time. Something that should never have been patched out of 3D (We should have a crying Duke flag for moments like this). Edit: gently caress Kleers.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 01:41
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 03:47
|
|
|
TinyDuke is not a meme.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 03:50
|
|
|
Cream-of-Plenty posted:TinyDuke is not a meme. It's a crying duke flag that the guy above me asked for 
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 03:52
|
|
|
Things that will instantly kill a kleer in any serious sam: -A single rocket/grenade direct hit -A single close range double barreled shotgun burst -A sledgehammer swing/chainsaw hitscan Except for first encounter, when you encounter kleers before you have a minigun/laser rifle you're in a relatively open area. Apply rockets at range, aiming for direct hits, then as they close, bait their leap (they will always leap as soon as they close to a certain range) and hit 'em with a shotgun blast/sledgehammer. Avoid using the pistols or tommygun unless you're really desperate: they won't do enough damage quickly enough for you to fend off a horde. Once you get a minigun/laser rifle/cannon all bets are off, so just make sure you know where your ammo is to backtrack when you run low. (I like kleers) Mejwell fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Sep 24, 2013 |
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 04:16
|
|
|
Yeah kleer can be really satisfying when you have the right tools and it's really satisfying to splash their bones with an explosive weapon or stunlock them to death with a minigun. Anything else and you'd better bone up on your dodging and crowd control skills. gently caress witch-brides and adult arachnoids, the former because they're loving terrible and the latter because they're basically boring turrets. e: and helicopters. basically gently caress most hitscan enemies in Serious Sam and any other non-serious shooter
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 04:36
|
|
|
You know, Quake 3 has aged astoundingly well. The only thing that really bugs me about it is, holy poo poo The Very End of You is a terrible level. It's basically a sniper duel map in a game where the only "sniper rifle" is not good. Every other map in the base game is at least decent, if not fantastic (which most of them are)- what the gently caress happened iD?
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 04:49
|
|
|
After playing the latest Serious Sam, I have a creeping suspicion that the netrisca implant is screwing him up. I mean, in the latest game - which takes place before the first Serious Sam - Netrisca helps Sam out by outlining ammo and weapons with colorful, well, outlines. In the first Serious Sam game, which chronologically takes place after latest game, Netrisca has helpfully turned the health pickups into shiny, colorful test-tubes, beating hearts and stuff. Enemies looks goofier. Her dialogue is not very serious. And in Serious Sam 2, Sam experiences the world like a cartoony, insane kill-a-ton world and Netrisca has suddenly taught herself to talk to him. I'm telling you, the Serious Sam games are actually the non-linear story of a mans descent into madness due to enchanced reality computer implants.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 04:55
|
|
|
SALT CURES HAM posted:You know, Quake 3 has aged astoundingly well. Might want to check out QuakeLive, it's basically Quake 3 in your browser that you can play with other people.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 05:01
|
|
SolidSnakesBandana posted:Might want to check out QuakeLive, it's basically Quake 3 in your browser that you can play with other people. I'm well aware of Quake Live, I just installed legit Q3 off Steam for shits and giggles mostly and I'm kind of astounded at how good it still looks/plays.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 08:08
|
|
|
SALT CURES HAM posted:You know, Quake 3 has aged astoundingly well. Almost every major FPS released in 1998 and 1999 has aged very well. Unreal 1 and Half-Life 1 are still some of the best single-player FPS games out there, SiN is basically the true sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament 99 are the apex of the Quake-style multiplayer FPS, and Team Fortress Classic is a blast to play.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 08:17
|
|
|
closeted republican posted:It's still very barebones compared to what DN3D did with interacting with the environment and exploring. A health boost may be fine in the context of the game, but it's pretty boring compared to what happened in DN3D when you interacted with the environment. In Hotel Hell, blowing up a single wall would destroy about 1/4 of the walls on the second floor of the hotel, kill any enemies near the walls, give you an escape route, and expose a small Atomic Health cache. In Hollywood Holocaust, hitting a switch would move the curtains in a movie theater, exposing a crack in the center of the screen. Blowing up the screen would reveal a secret room with a Jetpack, which you can use to get to the exit without having to take the intended path to it. In DNF, the most you can do is...play a lovely pinball game for a slight health boost. The minigames and random attempt at environment interaction were cool, they were just so damned out of place, unnecessarily slowed the game down, and felt like a chore after a while. And I loving love pinball. I might be the only one who doesn't mind the helicopters in SS3. Or the harpies, even though they pissed me off through all the Serious Sam games. Probably because they're not loving kleers. The double-barrel shotgun move's risky, because the devs loving love sending more than five hundred at a time, and zapping one will have three rear end in a top hat kleer drop you to fifteen health. Seriously, I'd take zombie chaingunners and Archviles over Kleer any day. In unrealistic pipe dream news, I'm seriously considering learning basic get-kicked-in-the-rear end-by-UE3's-map-editor skills to remake some of the ROTT maps, because gently caress linear levels with dumb platforming. JackMackerel fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Sep 24, 2013 |
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 10:29
|
|
|
I've been having a problem with eDuke where when I reload a saved game some sectors' ceiling and floor flats don't render and I can see through to the skybox. If that happens on Lunar Apocalypse and I go into one of those sectors, will the game decide Duke's in space and kill him or is it purely a graphical bug?
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 18:44
|
|
|
SALT CURES HAM posted:You know, Quake 3 has aged astoundingly well. Wasn't that level actually created in a day based on a bet between two id employees to see if they could bang out a level in a day that was worth a crap? Apparently enough people at id at the time decided that level was worth a crap and made it the final level in the single player "campaign". Yeah, the "space maps" were certainly the worst thing about Quake 3, in my opinion. I think I've come back to QuakeLive like 3 separate times now. It's fun, and then it is annoying as gently caress and I delete my bookmark to it. But then months later I just want to play something that is really, really familiar, so I go back. It's like a crazy ex or something.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 19:42
|
|
|
JackMackerel posted:The minigames and random attempt at environment interaction were cool, they were just so damned out of place, unnecessarily slowed the game down, and felt like a chore after a while. And I loving love pinball. Woah, let's not forget the greatest interactive piece of environment in gaming history: The Whiteboard 
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 19:43
|
|
Mak0rz posted:Woah, let's not forget the greatest interactive piece of environment in gaming history: The Whiteboard The whiteboard is eclipsed only by "turd in the toilet" as the greatest piece of interactivity in gaming history.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 19:45
|
|
|
My preview build of Shadow Warrior 2013 got magically upgraded to a review build yesterday. Reviews are embargoed until launch day and I'm still only halfway through it, but I think I'm safe to say that it definitely gets more Painkiller'y after the first 'episode'. Big ol' monster swarms aplenty.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 19:48
|
|
|
Dominic White posted:My preview build of Shadow Warrior 2013 got magically upgraded to a review build yesterday. Reviews are embargoed until launch day and I'm still only halfway through it, but I think I'm safe to say that it definitely gets more Painkiller'y after the first 'episode'. Big ol' monster swarms aplenty. Sounds lovely.  Definitely playing some Shadow Warrior Classic while waiting for the release
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 20:17
|
|
|
Dominic White posted:My preview build of Shadow Warrior 2013 got magically upgraded to a review build yesterday. Reviews are embargoed until launch day and I'm still only halfway through it, but I think I'm safe to say that it definitely gets more Painkiller'y after the first 'episode'. Big ol' monster swarms aplenty. I remember in totalbiscuit's Shadow Warrior 2013 quick look he mentioned that enemies are bullet spongy which isn't going to be a problem seeing how powerful the sword is at cutting monsters apart in the video. Do you have any problems shooting monsters to death in the preview build or if something has to die now its time to break out the rocket launcher or the sticky crossbow?
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 20:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 8, 2024 05:31 |
|
|
Essobie posted:Yeah, the "space maps" were certainly the worst thing about Quake 3, in my opinion. No way, The Longest Yard (Q3DM17) was a great map. Also, whoever was talking poo poo about the Railgun earlier has bad opinions.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2013 20:41
|
|
