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I'm playing Doom 64 EX at the moment, it's pretty great. I played the absolution TC ages ago, but this seems a lot better. It has a lot more dynamic lighting (on items and such) and overall the lighting is a lot less bleached out. I never played the N64 version though so I'm not entirely clear on whether it's any more faithful than absolution or if absolution has any advantages over it. Undying seems pretty good, although I have a horrible feeling of being lost and I think I probably missed a poo poo ton of secrets when I went down a dumbwaiter and out into the garden. The squid guys got reaaaally tiresome after I got out of the dream dimension though.
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Mar 22, 2013 00:24
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Dominic White posted:64EX is literally the N64 version running on a ZDoom-style source port. The only thing that would be more authentic would be running the ROM straight through an emulator, and that'd lose you all the perks of running on PC. That's awesome. I've never played Turok. I dunno how I managed to miss this thread, but I'm an old school FPS fan and recently I've been playing a bunch of them bit by bit, they're nice cause you can just drop in and have a good time you don't have to spend too long watching cutscenes or worry about story. Apart from Hexen. I do not like Hexen. Heretic was my first ever FPS. It was awesome. My parents let me play it and not doom because doom had real guns and you shot people in it. The closest heretic got to people was yellow michelin men full of ghosts. But Heretic was and is pretty great, nostalgia aside. Naturally I was just super jazzed when my dad got Hexen. It was like Heretic, but it had all this crazy new poo poo. Open world! New monsters! Three roided up todd mcfarlane badasses to choose from! Powerups out the rear end! I thought it was awesome at the time, mostly cause I just cheated and warped around the levels, but playing it again now, all that stuff is the reason it sucks. Hexen is not gritty, it is just ugly. Quake gets poo poo for being brown. Brown is a feature Quake lifted shamelessly from Hexen and ruined with the occassioanl brightly lit section. Hexen is muddy, foggy, dim, not even as interesting as dark. When I was a kid I found the game a little unsettling, I thought this was because of the scarier monsters and hanging corpses, but no. The game was just giving me seasonal depression. The art style is like something a van-airbrusher or metal album cover artist did in their off time using the colours they had left after they had used up all the colours that make people feel excitement. The class system sucks too. More choice! More playstyles! No. 4 weapons per playthrough. gently caress you. And if the repetition of using 1 or 2 weapons all the time wasn't bad enough, those weapons suck. The fighter's weapons suck. He doesn't get a ranged weapon till episode 2, so his extra health is offset by all the getting hit in the face he does. That ranged weapon being the hammer bros hammer from mario. Which I guess is cool. His ultimate weapon is a sword. A sword that you aren't even allowed to hit people with. It shoots green poo poo in a big wave, I guess because it's magic. The mage's default grandma brooch is his best weapon, which means you'll spend ages plinking away with the most boring effect in history. His ultimate incorporates the exciting design elements of redness and skulls but its main power is using all your mana to shoot stupid fire grappling hooks into the wall either side of your enemy. The cleric gets the best weapons, but they make no sense. A snake staff? I've not been to church many times but I've seen at least half of Witchfinder General and there was no snake staff in that. And Witchfinder General was awesome. His second weapon is I guess a spell the mage didn't really want. It doesn't even shoot holy beams out. Just basic fire. His ultimate is extremely rad however because it is a heavy metal crucifix that shoots ghosts. Angry ghosts with a lust for wrecking dudes. Sometimes they even turn around and wreck you. But you will never get to use it because it uses too much mana. The hub system is terrible. Maybe it's just me. Maybe at the time there were a hell of a lot of dudes writing in to Raven saying "Heretic was AWESOME but what would really kick it OFF THE CHAIN (it was the 90s) is if you had to revisit each level three times to unlock one extra room with 3 imps in and a switch you will not see.". But that's what most of the game is. They don't even tell you what the switches have unlocked. You just have to blunder about. The levels are poo poo too. Nobody wants to go to a cave once, never mind three times. It's not even a cool cave with like, lava and skeletons and a hidden demon temple. It's just a regular cave. The monsters all wear northface clothes and want to talk to you about stalactites and quartz. I guess to themeatically mirror the weapons, the enemies are poo poo too. There are like 5 of them and at least three of them are lifted from Heretic and made less fun. I guess they still had some lovely mechanics left over after they were done converting the Heretic monsters so the main other new monster is a fleshy centaur looking thing that blocks for like 2 seconds straight every time you hit them. It takes two hits to kill them of almost any weapon, so killing them is like being a cashier waiting for a senior citizen to find something in their purse then put it away again. There are 100 of them in every level and they all queue up behind the one that is currently wasting your time. Again like old people at a checkout. That is the whole game. Killing inconvenient, boring enemies with inconvenient, boring weapons to find a switch nobody gives a gently caress about. This post came out way spergier than intended so I guess i'll be chased out of here being whipped with model trains, but seriously gently caress Hexen.
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Mar 22, 2013 02:26
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Wait hold up I knew there was something I forgot to talk about: Hexen's powerups. They are bad. A lot of them are from Heretic. Heretic was a good game. Being able to hold on to powerups to use later was cool. Most of them were just the powerups from doom reskinned, but the real deal was the Tome of Power. The Tome of Power was cool as hell. It made whatever weapon massively powerful and changed what it did, it was like a berserk pack for every weapon. The kickass skull plasma rifle started firing red rain clouds that killed whatever was under it. The gold rocket launcher bird stick became a flamethrower. It made every weapon into two weapons and that was really awesome. What could Hexen, with its 4 weapons per character, really use? Something that could effectively double that weapon count? Nope. More Quartz Flasks. Quartz Flasks are purple flasks that give you health. Pretty useful yeah. They weren't that common in Heretic but in Hexen you can get like 40 of them no problem. I guess they had to cause the hub design meant they couldn't do regular health pickups cause you'd get them all when you first went through the lovely level, then be hosed when you went back to and a room full of bullet hell wizards or green versions of that devil guy from spawn opened up. But with quartz flasks you could just hammer enter and your dude would chug five and you could just heal through the barrage while backing down an extremely narrow corridor that makes it impossible to dodge projectiles. Making gently caress you traps more survivable means you can use more of them instead of appealing, fair level design elements. The other main thing was flechettes. Now in the real world a flechette is kind of a dart thing, but in Hexen they are bottles of green poo poo. They work differently for each class. The fighter uses them as extremely bouncy grenades that bounce off scenery and explode on his own face, the mage uses them as the timebomb from Heretic, and the cleric has them explode into a gas cloud. This gas cloud is great because it traps enemies in pain animations and lasts forever, so you can trap the annoying centaurs and spend 20 seconds watching them die while machinegun grunting. If you trap a couple of them in a cloud anyone passing will think your computer has locked up while you were watching gay porn. Then there was some kind of gold coaster that moved every monster back 3 feet, another thing that teleported you back to the start of the level because I guess even the designers realised that backtracking is boring as gently caress. Also boots of speed that made you move so fast you fell off a ledge, a pig version of the chicken-polymorph egg from heretic, and a small statue of a minotaur that you throw out and it stays as a small statue of a minotaur. Sometimes it will turn into an extremely unhelpful minotaur that kills enemies much slower than you would and also hits you with friendly fire. gently caress Hexen's powerups. edit: i cant spell juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Mar 22, 2013 |
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Mar 22, 2013 03:30
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It's time to talk about Blood. Blood is the best old-school FPS there is. Now I know what you're saying, it isn't Duke, it isn't Doom, it isn't Quake, if Blood is the best why isn't it iconic like those? I mean, I get where you're coming from, I said the same when my friend told me Blood was better than Duke. But I was wrong. The real answer as to why Blood is so comparatively forgotten is that all those other games are for the weak. Blood is really hard. Even on the easier difficulties it is hard. This puts a lot of people off. Blood on the second lowest difficulty is harder than Doom on Ultraviolent. The first level especially is a real trial by fire, as ammo and weapons are scarce and enemies are plentiful. But this teaches you the real lesson of Blood: that victory is in controlling your enemies, not just charging at them. Playing Blood like you'd play Doom gets you killed in about 5 seconds flat, by the most basic enemies in the first interior environment in the whole game. Wait, you might be getting the impression that the game's protagonist, Caleb, is not as badass as Doom Guy or Duke. No, he is more badass than either of them. Caleb is a gunslinger from a time in American history when the main activities were shooting the family dog, getting train-robbed, and dying a death of dignified starvation as your farm turned to dust and blew into the sky. So what? We've seen gunslingers before, nobody cares about cowboys anymore. But Caleb kicks it up a notch. Being a feared gunslinger wasn't enough for him, so he joined an evil cult and through his sheer awesomeness rose to the top. Caleb isn't a hero. He's a poo poo. But then the evil god Tchernabog turns on him and has Caleb and his buddies murdered. For most people being murdered ends things there. Not Caleb though, the game opens with him rising from his grave to begin the murderous rampage to end all murderous rampages. However, that's all backstory poo poo. Who cares about that in a classic shooter? But even without all that poo poo Blood would still be the best. Why? I can't give you a short answer in some sort of bullet-pointed list because I would just be listing all the components of the game. So it's the long answer. First let's go with the main menu. That might sound odd, but all games back then opened with a big fancy splash screen with some sort of badass picture of the protagonist shooting guys with horns in the face. Not Blood, Blood just shows a demo of the first level of the game overlaid with the main menu text, set in classy art-deco font. Why? It's because no man on earth could draw something more badass than Blood's gameplay. The level design friggin rules. Everything basically makes sense architecture-wise, maybe some liberties taken here and there, but it is themeatically consistent. It's all some twisted 1920s art deco poo poo, trains, castles, towns, mansions, funeral homes, loaded with secrets and references that cover the entirety of horror canon. There's a cask of amontillado reference in the second level. You think it's just a cute name for the bar, then BAM, guy loving walled up in there when you blow up a wall. The level everyone talks about when they talk about Blood is the evil fairground, where you can play fairground games with severed heads. But that's not my favourite. My favourite is the enormous haunted mansion, packed full of hidden rooms, bookcase doors, portraits that open to reveal secrets. You can spend aaages looking for secrets in there and you'll find tons of them. It's so interactive and so fun. You can even blow up parts of levels, allowing you to get to secret locations. The enemies that populate these awesome goddamn levels are hosed up and creepy. Their sprites are unsettling, slightly misproportioned claymation looking motherfuckers and it fits the mood of the game perfectly. There are axe wielding zombies, an army of cultists with shotguns and tommyguns, fire-breathing hellhounds, fish that sound like eagles for some reason?, grinning gargoyles that swoop around like mad fuckers. Any one of them can gently caress you up easily if you're not careful. The weapons are awesome. Well, ok, the pitchfork kind of sucks, but it's better than the fists you get in most of these things. Everything else basically one-ups the weapon selection in every other game. Pistol? Flaregun that shoots flares into dudes that cause them to burst into flames a few seconds later. Machinegun? Tommygun. Rocket launcher? Napalm launcher. Everything is better. A hairspray flamethrower is a basic tier weapon in Blood. The 3 types of dynamite really typify the gameplay. Including the alt-fire effects you have so many ways of using just the basic dynamite. You can throw it different ranges by holding down the button and have it explode on impact, or you can have it explode on a time delay and throw it and bounce it round a corner. Or you can set the fuse going then set it down at your feet, perfect for destroying chasing enemies. Then you get the proximity and remote detonation dynamite and you're playing chess with explosives. I think in my haste I forgot to mention the alt fire. Everything (except the pitchfork which sucks) has an alt-fire. The tommygun sweeps hilariously back and forth to clear rooms. The flaregun shoots a starburst of flames. The soul-stealing skull staff serves as a sentry. It's rad. What makes the weapons feel so good are the death effects. Heads pop off and you can kick them around. Burning cultists run around screaming till their skin drops off and their skeleton collapses into a hissing, spitting pool of blood and melted fat. Gibs fly far and wide. The voodoo doll makes people melt. The screams of the dying are harrowing, the sound design and voice acting work is incredible. Other games give their evil wizards gibberish cod-latin or backmasked clips of the developers saying 'floppy dicks'. Not Blood. Their cultists have their own language. The manual has a translation guide. Why? Because it's loving rad, that's why. I talked about Caleb earlier, but his voiceactor does more to make him awesome than the awesome backstory. Caleb has range. One minute he's muttering showtunes (that's right, MOTHER-FUCKIN SHOWTUNES), talking to himself absent mindedly, then he's cackling with evil glee as men explode, screaming. Duke is a one-trick pony, mumbling stolen movie one-liners in a voice so monotone it sounds like he's suffering from steroid-induced bell's palsy. Caleb has a shitload of lines, tons of them context sensitive to individual levels. The only thing really left to mention are the power-ups. Weaker men use medikits to heal themselves. Caleb uses them to patch his coat. What really sustains him are the still-beating hearts of his dead enemies and also hosed up eyeball abominations. Move over berserk pack, guns akimbo is here. One of the most memorable early setpieces in the game is when you're on a train (hell yes train) and you have basically just gotten a tommygun and the guns akimbo powerup. Now you have two tommyguns. The next carriage is a dining car full of like 30 goddamn cultists. You know what to do. Basically Blood owns and you should play it. Right now. It's on gog.com for far less money than it's worth.
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Mar 24, 2013 02:43
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I had less problems with bullshit unavoidable enemy damage in Blood than I did in Duke. You've got so many more options as far as indirect attack goes, and the only enemies that do hitscan damage to you are the cultists and they all die super fast. I think the reason the flaregun works the way it does is to allow you to kill cultists without having to remain in their line of fire. Or you can blitz them down with the shotgun or tommygun. In duke when the stupid chaingun raptors show up you're pretty much guaranteed to take some unavoidable damage, I mean jeez for a prime example of that just look at the first second of the first level of episode 3. I think the reason Blood's locations feel so much more real world than Duke or other games at the time is the consistent scale. Every building is scaled as if you could go inside it, whereas in Duke, Doom 2, pretty much any other game with cities in, the inaccessable buildings are always far far smaller than anything you can go inside and it really breaks up the games internal consistency. They also have more or less believable internal configurations, to an extent, whereas Duke and Doom end up with a lot of buildings that make 0 sense as part of anything but a game.
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Mar 24, 2013 03:53
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I didn't play Blood (or duke nukem for that matter) till the late 2000s, and I've never had that much trouble with the mouse. I play the gog version, I dunno if that includes the bmouse fix or w/e so if it doesn't I have been playing without it. Really I'd be happy if I could get y-axis movement to be the saame speed as x-axis, cause it does tend to yaw like crazy.
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Mar 24, 2013 14:58
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Huh, whenever I try to run serpent resurrection I get this error:GZDoom posted:Script error, "serpent.pk3:decorate/weapons" line 9: I can't find any reference to it with google (I will live to regret saying this I am guessing), and I have no idea what could be going wrong. I installed it according to the instructions and it seems to be loading the WADs fine. edit: nevermind I'm retarded my GZDoom was an older version than required. juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Mar 24, 2013 |
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Mar 24, 2013 19:38
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Today I would like to talk about Doom 2. I know what you're thinking, 'Why Doom 2? Everyone already knows Doom 2. Everyone likes Doom 2.'. But you're wrong. Nobody likes Doom 2. Not really. You might think you like Doom 2. I thought I liked Doom 2. But I don't and you don't. I came to realise that nobody really likes Doom 2, interestingly enough, the last time I played Doom 2. I thought to myself, awesome, time to play some sweet beans Doom 2. But every level I came to I thought "Oh man, not this level". Then the next level came along, "Oh man, not this level". Again and again. Sure, it lulls you in to a false sense of security with the early handful of levels. But after that, the point at which I stopped thinking "Oh man, not this level" was the end of the game. There are no good levels in Doom 2. Actually there are a couple, but it's not as dramatic saying "a majority of the levels in Doom 2 are lovely". Now that I've said the levels in Doom 2 are lovely enough times (though you can't overstate it (you can and I have)) I'm gonna explain why the levels in Doom 2 are lovely. There are a few criteria which I use to judge levels in games, presented here in no particular order: 1) Looks/Thematic Consistency - I put these two together cause they're purely aesthetic and don't have anything to do with gameplay. I like levels to look good, and I like them to make a token attempt at making sense. I'm fine with weird layouts and poo poo as long as they're in the right place, like hell in Doom. It's more fun fighting monsters in a badass hellscape or ancient tech base than it is fighting them in a brown cube. 2) Monster and item placement - Self-explanatory. Where the monsters and items are placed shapes the action. Bad monster and item placement can make a level boring or unfair. Good monster and item placement sets up memorable encounters and awesome scenarios (See the Blood train level where the guns akimbo powerup is put right next to the diner car full of cultists). For the sake of having three bullet points I'm gonna include traps in here, gently caress-you or otherwise. 3) Flow - The path the player takes through the level and the game in general. I don't like to backtrack. If you make me backtrack there better be something new to see there, some dramatic or rad change. Otherwise I'm just like "hey its this part of the level that was much better earlier when it had monsters and items in". I know John Romero digs on backtracking but that guy made Daikatana so he can gently caress off. So yeah for me to get really jazzed about a level it's gotta get pretty good marks in all three. I can forgive a level that sucks in one aspect if it's great in the other two. I don't have like some crazy rear end ulililia numerical scoring system, although I guess my argument might be more compelling with some sweet bar charts involved. Whatever. Basically every Doom 2 level is ugly as poo poo and makes no sense as any sort of building anywhere ever. These levels are ugly for no good reason at all. You'd think if you were gonna be lazy as gently caress with your visual design you'd at least pick textures from the same set, just so you could get a basic level of consistency going. Nope. The map designers in Doom 2 went to specific effort to make their levels ugly and clashing. Consider that Doom 2, while lacking formal episodes, is allegedly divided up into pseudo-episodes, each covering a particular sort of environment. Starport, hellish outpost, city, hell itself. You'd think the levels would in some way or another mirror this, but no. Not unless the starport built its waste tunnels from friggin medieval wood. Maybe they could have. Maybe they hired some radical french architect and said to him 'Jean Pierre make our waste tunnels with envy of the world' so he goes off and buys a boatload of friggin teak and metal rivets and skull decorations and wall-sconces and builds map 5, The Waste Tunnels. Then the starport officials come down and say 'Jean Pierre, this is beautiful, but where does the waste go? Why are there hidey holes full of medikits? Why the flashing floor arrows and alcove-based puzzles?' and Jean Pierre calls them philistines and makes lots of outraged, accusatory french hand gestures and storms off and they're just stuck with it cause they already paid him. But that's a little unfair, The Waste Tunnels is at least internally consistent, consistently brown, but consistent. Other levels just don't give a gently caress. Yeah gently caress it lets put wooden doors in this tech base with no other demonic features. Yeah let's make this sector in this room randomly a different texture. Let's mix it up and make this elevator out of ugly green stone. The texture designers are at least a little to blame. Some of the textures they added are loving hideous. Can anyone justify that one blue/red flecked glowing wall texture at all? What is that supposed to be? It's not ice or fire or crystal or anything. It can't even pass for bad children's wallpaper cause it loving glows.  Enough about the game's ugliness. Let's move on to cussing its monster and item placement. Imagine the word CHALLENGE superimposed on a video of Sandy Petersen plopping down revenants in small rooms and laughing. This is how all the monsters in the game were placed. I guess they decided to up the ante of monster closets in Doom 1 by adding lots of gently caress-you traps. gently caress-you traps are seperated from normal traps by their severity and lack of forewarning. If you don't know about it before hand, you're done son. Even if you do you're still gonna take damage. At one point you take a teleport and WOOP! Three imps biting your face, pressed up against your hot bod in hell's portaloo. There's no way to avoid getting hurt there. Consider also the mega chaingunner gently caress you trap from map 9 The Pit. Straight up. Now to me good game design involves never forcing the player to take damage. It should always be avoidable, unless you give them health both before and after doing it. Otherwise if you force them to take damage and they don't have enough health to survive they'll be hosed. Doom 2 doesn't care about that. Doom 2 will gently caress you for the next level as well. There is basically no ammo in map 9, THE PIT, and there are tons of monsters. Even if you get the secrets you are gonna be low on ammo when you reach map 10, THE REFUELLING BASE! which is one of the harder levels in the game. You can call me a bitch and bad at the game but the fact is even the best player is gonna make a net loss on ammo in a lot of the levels. Doom 2 is not a challenging game but for the gently caress you traps and lack of pickups. Nowadays being able to use the mouse to aim and easier strafing cover for these weaknesses somewhat, but at the time with a keyboard it would have been a lovely experience. Once you escape from the lovely confines of the starport and such you reach the city episode, where you will enjoy wandering around a poorly scaled, nonsensical cityscapes looking for a switch or a door or a key. Just as quake stole brown from hexen, hexen stole obtuse, open world shittery from doom 2 like some kind of game design human centipede. A lot of the time big, open maps are just laziness. A level should guide the player and progress logically. Some open world levels do this, but most of them are just so the designer doesn't have to think of how they're going to link up the level's setpieces. Don't get me wrong Doom 1, which is a great game everyone likes, had some lovely loving levels at times too. But there is an important mitigating factor there: Nobody who made Doom had ever played Doom before. Doom 2 came after like a year, and presumably a few high quality user-made WADs. Why weren't the levels better? Why didn't they learn from the mistakes of the bad levels in Doom 1? It's not like we can blame it solely on new map designers, as John Romero, who made most of the awesome episode 1 of Doom 1, turns up and shits out a couple of terrible, ugly maps. Doom 2 makes a lot of improvements on Doom 1 however. It fattens up the skinny monster heirarchy, it adds a much needed mid-level damage boost in the form of the super shotgun, so you don't have to grind down cacos with the regular shotgun anymore. Some of the new monsters are loving annoying and utilised extremely badly in Doom 2, like the chaingunner and pain elemental, but that's how they're used and not so much the monsters themselves. There are a couple of great fun (still ugly) maps in the game too, like Tricks and Traps, but they're drowned out by the terrible and the mediorce. User made WADs from the time, like The Plutonia Experiment, show how good Doom 2's basic toolkit of monsters, weapons and items can be when used right. It's just the levels that let Doom 2 down, and there's really no good reason why the levels are so bad. It's why nobody really likes Doom 2.
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Mar 25, 2013 21:23
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esselfortium posted:I adore The Pit Are you sure it isnt stockholm syndrome?
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Mar 26, 2013 00:43
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They give shotguns too much spread these days, then when they don't have too much spread they have crappy animations and sounds. The reload on the super shotgun is really what makes it feel so good. Doom 64 has the super shotgun but its sprite doesn't have a proper reload animation so while it still feels powerful it isn't half as badass.Guillermus posted:I take them as non-serious, over the top opinions. That's what they are. My post on Doom 2 said quite a few times that Doom 2 isn't all terrible levels and is far from all bad. juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Mar 26, 2013 |
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Mar 26, 2013 01:40
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Is there a functional source port of Dark Forces about anywhere? All my googling has turned up is Dark XL, which I remember reading in this thread isn't finished and the guy may be crazy or something?
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Mar 26, 2013 01:52
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I've got a couple of weird old-school shooter questions based memories of a game I saw my dad playing when I was a little kid. I've never been able to locate it, mostly because my only memories of it are a dark green demon enemy whose death animation was its skin falling off its skeleton then the skeleton collapsing. The other thing was possibly in the same game, but it was a level of (i think) slot machines with big eyeball monsters hiding behind them. I'm pretty sure they were 2.5d games, they both used sprites for the enemies. There was also another game, later and 3d, where there was a revolver where the reload animation was your guy palm-slamming a fistful of assorted cartridges into the gun.
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Mar 26, 2013 01:58
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esselfortium posted:And here I thought you didn't like to backtrack! Read literally the next line after the part you quoted. Sheesh, you'd think I'd gone into watch & weight and cussed scarves and boat shoes. All this Marathon talk's got me interested. For the longest time I assumed it was on consoles or something, now that I know there's a source port I'll have to check it out.
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Mar 26, 2013 02:08
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PLAY DOOM 64! Doom 64 is poo poo-hot and my favourite Doom game. It's very different to the other Dooms, in some ways better and in some ways worse. I want to get this out of the way: The sprites suck varying degrees of rear end, some just upper buttock, some straight brown-town. There are a couple I like better. The chaingun looks like it was made out of bigrig exhaust mufflers and the chainsaw has two blades. That's rad. The rest is bad. All the monsters have been redone using janky early CGI models and they're more vertically stretched than Nicki Minaj in a music video. The zombiemen are indistinct and ugly, the baron of hell is like the laziest ever palette swap of the hell knight, even lazier than the original. The Cacos have weird arms and poo poo, the pain elementals have two mouths, I guess the new lost souls are pretty rad, they're all demony now. But the problem with them all is that the detail on them is kind of dark and hard to make out, it sucks. Also the shotguns have both lost their extremely rad reload/pump animations and the plasma rifle is some ghostbusters poo poo that buzzes constantly and doesn't go BOWAP extremely loudly and rapidly. So yeah that's all pretty damning cause the charming monster sprites and excellent weapons are one of the main appeals of Doom right? Luckily Doom 64 is all killer no filler in every other department. As well as the sprites they totally redid all the art and music for the game. The levels are dark and moody and the music is atmospheric as hell. In terms of mood it has a lot more in common with Quake than it does with Doom. I love the weird midi metal songs of Doom, the atmospheric ambient music of Doom 64 much better fits the level and makes the game feel, not exactly scary but creepy in places. Which is a feat considering as a modern gamer i am used to games stealing my mother's face from facebook and sticking it on a monster that actually rips my dick off irl. The levels look and play awesomely. Partly cause they added shitlots of new features to the engine like fancy coloured lighting, kind of fake room-over-room poo poo, triggers you activate by shooting them, dart traps. But mostly the levels are just extremely well designed. They are fun to play, the monster placement is top notch, when they make you backtrack they spawn new poo poo in to fight and often the level changes cause they have the ability to do so much more dramatic room changes. The set-pieces in this game are enough to center whole levels around without it getting tiresome. The old monster closets are gone. You have no loving idea what is going to happen when you throw that obviously boobytrapped switch. Normally in other doom games you can tell from the shape of the room what is going to pop open. Here no chance. The entire floor might fall away and pillars will rise up out of lava and barons of hell are gonna be on them. Or giant stampers are gonna pop down from the ceiling and stamp down some arachnotrons. It's crazy, poo poo will get real. The secrets are great too, there are some really huge multi-part secrets that require you to shoot various switches, lower lifts so you can shoot other switches, run over a certain floor tile, it gets crazy and figuring them out is not a case of pressing E on everything and getting mad (ok sometimes it is but usually it isn't). THEMEATIC CONSISTENCY! This game has it out the rear end. The visual design is consistent as HELL. The shape of the level conforms to the type of level it is. The tech base levels get progressively more warped and labyrinthine the closer you get to the hell levels. The hell levels range from badass imposing gothic fortresses to caves (rad caves with skeletons and lava and hidden demon temples) to complexes floating in the void (such as in hit level In The Void). With the lighting and the fog and the scrolling skies this game looks great. The tech bases are way more run down and hosed up than in the other Dooms, everything looks like it's been abandoned and irradiated for 50 years (which it has according to the storyline). In terms of everything these maps are extremely fun, they have challenge, and they also have enough powerups and ammo in the level to make it fair. Everyone can have safe, clean fun with Doom 64. It might throw an unprecedented amount of barons of hell at you sometimes, but you also have enough ammo in the game to take them on. It's not just the set pieces that make the levels so good. They could be entirely lacking all the new poo poo and be in the old doom engine and still be some of the best doom levels ever made for an official release. There's a rad new weapon. It's called the unmaker. It's made out of demon skin and bones and it shoots lasers and you can upgrade it to shoot more lasers by finding hidden demon keys. It makes up for the lovely plasma rifle. The monsters are a little different. The chaingunners, revenants and archviles are missing. The pain elementals are still here and they shoot two lost souls at once. Which would be annoying as gently caress if they hadn't made it so lost souls can be killed with one shotgun blast now. Now blasting a swarm of them is fun. There are nightmare imps now too which are like the spectre equivalent of imps. They're pretty cool. I like the monster balance in this game a lot. They know when to throw beefy guys at you and they know when to throw a swarm of smaller guys. It's fun. You'll like it. I guarentee. I don't know poo poo about the history of this game, but as it was made for the N64 that means it was made by Nintendo, and if it was made by Nintendo it was made in Japan. I'm guessing some young japanese guy, a hardcore fan of all the doom games, was given porting it as his first assignment after graduating from drawing animals from blurry reference photos to create new pokemon. His cigar chomping boss came over and dropped it on his desk and said 'Kid I want this ported by tonight'. Often game ports are extremely lovely. Look at Doom for PSX. Not this one. That japanese guy knew what he was doing. He didn't remove pillars and call it a day. He kicked it up a notch. And I salute him. Now with the miracle of modern technology you can experience this game in the form of Doom 64 EX.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:35
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Copper Vein posted:Just like Turok, right? Exactly.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:44
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Sobatchja Morda posted:I think the true story is even more bizar. Midway gets hired to make a new Doom game, but works together with Id on it. Now, by the time they were doing this, Id was already busy with Quake and Doom was pretty much dead in the water. What that means, is that Midway was free to do whatever the hell they wanted. And they came up with a rather ambitious plan... That's actually really interesting. I looked at the dates on wikipedia a while ago and was surprised to see it came out after quake. I think Doom 64 is a pretty worthy sequel to the first two Doom games. It definitely stacks up them in a way that Final Doom (although I do love the plutonia experiment) doesn't.
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Mar 30, 2013 00:48
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HARD RESET! is a game I enjoyed a fair amount. HARD RESET! also sucked a whole bunch in a lot of ways. Let's talk about HARD RESET! Painkiller is a great game. I love Painkiller. It's got it all. The weapons are hella crazy. Every one of them has at least two firing modes and you can combine them usually in crazy ways. The shotgun is pretty basic, you can freeze dudes then smash them with primary fire. The stake gun is just raw. It shoots stakes, it shoots nades, you can shoot a nade with a stake, it becomes a rocket, that's cool. Why bother with that when you already have a rocket launcher? Shut up, it's cooler. Speaking of the rocket launcher, its alternate fire is a chaingun. By combining the two firing modes you can shoot guys with bullets then shoot them with rockets. That's innovation. The enemy catalogue is one HELL of a catalogue. They went through the dictionary and straight up just put evil in front of every noun. Evil zombie, evil skeleton, evil biker, evil sadomasochist, evil ninja, evil amputee, evil mentally ill man, all standard fare till you get to evil saracen, evil pillowcase child, evil pinochio, evil suicidal wall-street banker, evil fat feet necklace man, evil jumping papier-mache crab, etc etc. Wondering where all the evil nouns that aren't animate went? They're what the levels are made out of, buddy. Every one of those bricks holds extremely poor opinions about minorities and healthcare. Enemy variety is extremely high is what I am saying. And they all explode into blood when you shoot them and don't have way too much health. The levels are basically as varied as the enemies. There's jail, an opera house, wall street, a pirate zombie mine, a science lab, a haunted orphanage, persia, a forest nobody likes to talk about. It's rad. You won't get bored. They're pretty spacious and cool. There are secrets which personally i found extremely annoying to get as you have to gently caress about with the game physics, but other than that the levels pull off cool and creepy and set a tone pretty well and even though they don't follow on from eachother in any sort of sense it's fun and exciting to see what crazy poo poo comes next. The music is great, it's all enthusiastic metal, much in the tradition of ye olde Doom. If you're not pumped to shoot ninjas in the snow using electric shurikens you probably have serious mental problems, but this music will provide the pumpage and the pulse-poundage that your broken mind cannot. The story sucks, nobody cares. Max payne is in hell struggling against some kind of shotgun-resistant LGBT angel so he can save his wife or that sexy lady from all those romantic era paintings where the only thing they can make clothes out of is damp gossamer. Also there are challenges that net you pokemon cards that give you cool powers that just totally trivialise the bosses. The challenges add an extra level of fun and (appropriately) challenge to the game I guess depending on which one you get, some suck like NEVER COLLECT A SINGLE SOUL but some are fun, like completing a whole level with a certain weapon. It's a cool game, pretty much the last good retro shooter, you have already played it but if you haven't (and you have) you should play it now.
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Apr 14, 2013 22:32
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I can't believe I didn't try brutal doom until now. It's a blast. And somehow way harder than regular doom, which I can beat on ultraviolent in my sleep. Although sometimes it does seem to err a little on the side of torture-porny, although I could just be getting old and soft. I just kind of want to sit the guy who made it down and be like "is everything at home ok little buddy?". Just check he's doing alright, and doesn't have a basement full of dead cats.
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Jul 28, 2013 00:32
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I dunno, Hard Reset did well with having shitloads of secrets to find.
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Aug 1, 2013 15:32
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I've noticed a lot of people (or at least a lot of people I've talked to) rag on HL1 for aging badly. Whereas to me it's aged perfectly fine. I didn't play it till a few years after it was out, definitely after I'd played deus ex, and it still impressed me. I've never encountered a game that managed to give a place such a sense of scale. Black Mesa feels unimaginably huge, partially down to the monorail sequence at the start but I think also down to how each part of the facility you go to feels like part of a larger complex, rather than isolated 'levels'. It's difficult to articulate without it making it sound like I'm saying the level design was bad, but very few of the places you go feel like they were specifically designed as levels, rather it feels like they were structured first as like offices or labs and then had levels put over the top of them by breaking bits to block your path. Sections like Xen and the rocket testing place with the tentacles feel a lot gamier, but they still fit. The variety involved in the gameplay is great too, how it shifts so frequently into different types of conflict. Going from fighting aliens in close quarters to the full scale military assault outdoor was a real thrill. Maybe it's because we've seen similar individual set pieces done better in more recent games that people think HL1 has aged badly. But I haven't seen a game since that has put together so many of them into a cohesive whole, or been so varied. Quake and Doom seem like they've aged better because they are pure gameplay, and gameplay very rarely dates, tetris is still fun today. But half-life's world is still as convincing to me as it always was, in it's cohesion and sense of realism.
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Aug 13, 2013 17:56
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Gat dang plutonia experiment is hard when you play it with brutal doom.
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Aug 23, 2013 23:38
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Does anyone remember an advert for I think Quake that was a skull inside a whole bunch of machinery, like drills and stuff? Looked really gigery.
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Aug 26, 2013 00:16
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I think they got away with a lot of this stuff cause at the time buying a games magazine was marginally less respectable than buying porno.
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Aug 26, 2013 18:48
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Is the plutonia experiment as unfairly hard normally as it is with brutal doom? I played through the whole thing in gzdoom a few years ago but now I'm replaying it with brutal doom and there are just so many gently caress you traps and even gently caress you level starts. I thought unavoidable damage was a big no-no in game design but a lot of it is unavoidable without quicksaving and loading a bunch. So far the worst offender has been map20, the death domain, which starts you in a huge, open courtyard with no cover and multiple arachnotrons and chaingunners and a revenant who detect you the second you move. Even starting the level with 100 armour and health I got chewed up 5 times before I managed to make it into a sewer thing with about 15 health left. The rest of the level has been full of gently caress yous too, like a room full of chaingunners who come up on a lift when you enter the room, and a tiny platform with about 6 teleporting barons on it.
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Aug 28, 2013 17:40
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Interestingly I found Go 2 It easier in brutal doom than regular doom, but some of the basic plutionia levels have been some real poo poo to deal with.
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Aug 28, 2013 18:59
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:I loved Plutonia UV w/ Brutal Doom. TNT on the other hand...I don't know, but TNT's levels strike me as really ugly. TNT is just pretty terrible in general compared to plutonia.
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Aug 28, 2013 22:42
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I'm not complaining about brutal doom altering plutonia, I was just wondering if some of the stuff in plutonia was as gently caress-you in base doom as it seems in brutal doom. I like the double down of difficulty for the most part, it's just some sections of the game have made me save scum more than I'd like to. Now all I need is brutal doom 64. Are there any other doom megawads that work well with brutal doom, like alien vendetta or something?
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Aug 29, 2013 13:39
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The first few maps of AV with brutal doom have been hella fun.
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Aug 29, 2013 23:13
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That was the level I got stuck on and gave up on last time i played alien vendetta. I was really really impressed with how it looked, but it was confusing as hell.
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Aug 30, 2013 22:24
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Bought a caco and a pain elemental. How the hell did the $200 figurines sell out? Way too rich for my blood.
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Sep 2, 2013 22:07
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:Wasn't the Shambler a yeti creature? the shambler is based on one of the lovecraftian monsters (the dimensional shambler) that sandy petersen wrote about in the old call of cthulhu pen and paper game books he worked on. i don't have them to hand anymore but a lot of the illustrations for the monsters in one of the older editions are almost exact matches to quake monster.
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Sep 3, 2013 17:09
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poo poo dude, I'd pay some scratch for that style of doom shirt.
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Sep 5, 2013 00:56
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I found this nestled away on the Brutal Doom facebook page, a partial changelist of stuff coming up quote:Partial Changelog as of 02/09/2013
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Sep 6, 2013 19:49
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Brutal Doom is definitely a case of came for the gore, stayed for the gameplay. I love how it rebalances the game and makes it so much more dynamic. The gore helps all the weapons feel more powerful and badass, but the levelling of the playing field between guns means I actually use the different guns now. I went through most of the doom games basically just using the shotgun and then sometimes the chaingun for sniping. Regaining health with the fatalities is also great, cause it adds a big risk/reward element with meleeing the tougher monsters. Managing to kick a baron of hell in the nuts and punch him to death is pretty tough, but you get pretty much full health from doing it.
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Sep 6, 2013 23:27
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Tiger Schwert posted:It was 7 rockets. And that's still completely dumb. it depends where you run into one. in big open areas it's dumb, but when you run into one in tighter spaces it makes the fight less frustrating, cause the new rocket pattern brutal doom adds to the cyberdemon can be really hard to dodge without maneuvering room.
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Sep 8, 2013 23:55
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Tiger Schwert posted:How to dodge a vanilla Cyberdemon's rocket salvo : Move slowly in one perpendicular direction while making sure there is nothing the rockets will splash against. The brutal doom cyberdemon fires in more of a spread pattern, so it's much harder to stream his rockets unless you're in a big enough area. the creator of brutal doom recommends Alien Vendetta as a wad to play with brutal doom, and pretty often in that wad you'll find cyberdemons in enclosed corridors (the worst example being in that wretched pyramid level). Cyberdemons in base doom were always easy as hell, they were just a boring chore.
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Sep 9, 2013 14:15
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When you stand still they seem to fire in bursts of 4 or 5 and two of them veer off to the left and right, so if you try and wait to dodge the stream of rockets at the last second it pastes you anyway.
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Sep 9, 2013 14:49
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I don't like the change to spider masterminds to make them immune to non-headshot damage, it makes them really difficult to fight in some levels because of how they're placed so you can only really shoot their legs.
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Sep 9, 2013 16:44
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Korendian Leader posted:I honestly can't see how this fight would work with brutal doom. I'll have to load it up and see for myself. Given the mechanics, i'm not too optimistic however. honestly I did it by alerting the cyberdemon on the lower staircase further down the hall, getting him to stand on the staircase where he thought he could shoot me but really the terrain blocked the rockets and then shot him in the head with the assault rifle till he died. Then I did the same thing with the second one on the branching corridor, but got him standing so his rockets shot into the corner instead of at me. I've got to be honest though I hate boss enemies in first person shooters. anything that makes them die quicker is OK by me.
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Sep 9, 2013 17:31
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Those are some really good points, and explains pretty concisely why brutal doom fucks up boss-heavy maps. Go 2 It was a huge pain in the rear end cause I spent so long ducking in and out of cover shotgunning cyberdemons. I like the rest of the changes brutal doom makes to monsters, but the bosses are hugely unfun.
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Sep 9, 2013 18:20
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