Doom

Here's a Doom tidbit I didn't put in the Doom 3 review: I disliked Doom 2 because it didn't have the little map screen the original game did. It's total window dressing, but for some reason to my young mind it put in this extra layer of immersion. I used to imagine the Space Marine hiking his way to these remote locations along the surface of the Martian moons, hoping each time they wouldn't be overrun with Demonic nonsense and then solemnly rip/tearing through them. (Actually that might have been in there, but I don't remember and it amuses me to this day)

Here's another tidbit: AMD named a processor the threadripper. Huge threads. Huge threads to rip and tear.

Also, worth noting, the original Doom never goes to Mars. Episode 1 is set on Phobos, which is a tiny as tiny gets moon orbiting Mars. Episode 2 involves teleporting to Deimos, which now orbits Hell itself, and then you just climb down to Hell in episode 3. Seriously, I swear the plot was you just threw a rope down and casually climbed down to Hell like it wasn't any sort of thing.

Anyway, so in this, Doom 4 which we'll just call Doom from now on actually lifts a lot of its genome from Doom 3. There's a lot of weird overlap that doesn't feel so much intentional as parallel evolution, although Doom 4 skips act 1 of Doom 3 and just kinda rushes forward from there, as well as having a completely weird story that has equal parts schlock and Jacob Hargreave going on in it.

It's also the first shooter in a long, long time to truly abandon the "realism" elements that drag down shooters and instead says F-it, you're the DOOMSLAYER.

A break in the role for action - Wolfenstein The New Order

Shooters are such a weird thing to me, nowadays.

First off, not that many people played Doom or Quake. Not among the gamers you see talking about "old school" shooter design. I've come to the conclusion "old school" is basically the most meaningless pair of words you can see applied to a shooter, and that people say they played old school in the same way people claim nintendo and apple are innovators.

Wolfenstein The New Order is old school, according to the usual chorus of voices on the internet that always say that. But that doesn't actually mean anything, and if you're like me and expecting a Doom/Quake early era design... Welp, forget it, that's not this game. That's not this game at all.

Second, texture pop in is so strange. I only ever see it in shooters, for obvious reasons, but it's just so wonky to me. It feels like something you shouldn't ever see, but you clearly do, and what's up with that?

Also was I the only one who seriously thought this game would pick up after the earlier Wolfenstein and just involve a time travel plot? I guess that's sort of a spoiler, but it doesn't involve any time travel, which totally disappointed me. I guess that's sort of the theme of this game and my interactions with it.

Wolfenstein TNO is a first person shooter about violently attacking fascist ideology with firearms, and then a lot of strangeness around that. If you played the last Wolfenstein shooter, though, you'll be confused to find this is more of a "weird science" than "occultism" centric shooter, which I believe goes more toward the game's roots but I could be remembering wrong.

It's also kind of generic among id games for that. Actually it kinda reminds me of Fallout mixed with Quake 2. It sort of does that more than anything, though.

Steam sale holiday 2015: This is why we can't have nice things

It's time for another steam sale! It's time for who cares!

There are three things of worth to mention re: this steam sale. This is all text, and it's not even very funny, so feel free to not read this discussion of "the moar thangs change~"

The Death of Steam Sales

No, they're not going away, but I'm going to be honest in that no flash deals and no dailies all but instantly killed the sale for me and everyone I know in terms of enthusiasm. I just immediately bought Axiom Verge, a couple friends immediately bought this or that, and we all collectively moved on. I originally made a Steam account during a Steam sale quite a many years back, and in a lot of ways it shaped my perceptions of Steam as well as how I interact with friends regarding Steam. The big sales used to be an influx of discussion within my peers, with each of chattering about what we hope goes on sale, wondering if a game is worth it and mocking poor sales that over-estimate a game's remaining value.

There's no rush to f5 at 10 PST and there's no real excitement. No one really cares. It lacks the proverbial punch that previous sale models did, and it all seems to come down to one thing. Or two things. Well, a couple things.

Cards for Stars: Steel Storm Burning Retribution

Retribution is going to be one of those dirty words I stop wanting to see in titles.

Anyway: this game didn't have cards up until recently, but I can remember ages ago wanting to play it and ending up with it in a bundle. Pre-cards, I apparently played four minutes, but it might have been before I got my first controller for my PC.

Post-cards, well, here I am.

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is four random words strung together, titled a three quarters from the back shooter. It plays sort of like a twin-stick and sort of like a shmup - I think this sort of game used to be quite common and now is not quite so.

Steel Storm BR has most of the basics down pat: the controls work well, the game looks fine, the weapon loadouts feel good and the weapon sounds work nicely. The little hovertank feels pretty good, a bit less requiring of frustrating finesse compared to the usual twin stick controls while still engaging your hnads in a nice way.

The music isn't very good. The problem lies in the usual, the NES problem: tracks are too short and there's too much downtime where the music becomes the core of the experience.

The game itself drops the floor out from under itself. Combat feels good and relatively slick, but it becomes very obvious very quickly that the camera angle cripples you. As best I can tell, you just can't hit enemies "off the screen", which happens almost instantly once you try to dodge away from incoming fire. The enemy seems to basically not exist off the screen, they don't follow up or pursue you, they just dawdle around. You can seemingly hit them with the MIRV special weapon, but I haven't found the other weapons can reliably snipe them while you're off dodging, so you end up with combat often taking a really long time.

The game also does a lot of things that dilute the enjoyment. For one, as I said, the camera is just so far up that you can't really get into the groove of fighting through multiple enemies - you're constantly pedaling back and forth out of conflict. The game also uses health packs, but there really isn't much threat in the game except for the other big thing I dislike. Enemies are initially placed on the map, but that's not all that dangerous since as I said they don't pursue and don't really come after you. So the game teleports enemies on top of you, en masse, which is about the only time you're really threatened. You never die to attrition, so these weird health packs that heal 25% just feel monotonous. But since you're never really under any threat from placed enemies, I guess regenerating health felt like too much.

Also the game has keycards and unlocking doors and all that jazz, but it doesn't really do much other than set off teleporting enemies and pad out the game's length. The doors and stuff just end up looking really lazy, it's not like you're lowering defenses or using special circumstances to blow through them, they're literally "a forcefield" that sits around "the target". It's boring.

Basically the game's core is good, but the AI is way too lacking and the camera is awful. If you could see more, fight more at a great range with more visuals going off I think the game would have been pretty exciting. You get these great moments now and again, but on the most part it just feels sluggish. The teleporting enemies thing just leads to cheap, irritating deaths that coupled with the plodding out of combat pace make for a really dull experience. I finished the tutorial and a pair of missions and just found it too plodding.

As an odd note, I re-watched superbunnyhop's two parter on Rage and Doom a couple days ago. He talks about the gameplay of Doom as being a top down shump extended out to psuedo-3D - something akin to Maximum Carnage or Smash TV, maybe - but this game really is just that, but not in 3D. Keycards, circle strafing, dodging slow moving projectiles. It could have been great, but instead it's too slow and too plodding.

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

Scary Games Month: FEAR 2 is a game about diet cola beverages

Time for another horror game, as it is scary games month still, the even more bizarre sequel to the rather bizarre FEAR, which is an acronym for "First Encounter Assault Recon" which I guess works well enough. Fear 2 (there's no way I'm capitalizing every usage of the word Fear in here, I hope you don't mind) is sort of an odd sequel because Monolith sold then regained the rights to the Fear series somewhere within development, resulting in (supposedly) some of the oddities in the story. Regardless, the original is from 2005 while the sequel is from 2009, but I'm not entirely sure it looks it.

Fear is kinda noted for three different things: One, slow-mo bullet time! Hard Reset has some of this too but it's way better in Fear ie actually useful. I think bullet time was supposedly pretty common at about the original Fear's era of development but the mechanic has mostly fallen off. I kinda like the mechanic since it offers you another resource to ration out in combat, though I admit it's basically a pale shadow of the Crysis suit's tactical options. For those uninformed, during slow mo you move somewhat faster and enemies move much slower and you can toggle it on or off as you go.

Second, Fear is a little unusual in being a consistent running horror fps series. Most horror games are over the shoulder third person, or are less reliant on gunplay, which makes for an odd dynamic. I have to admit straight up that I didn't find the original Fear all that scary if at all as opposed to Doom 3 which did get me a little bit here or there. But I'll talk about that more later.

Third, Fear is notable for having a story that appears to have been crafted in the most bizarre, brainstorming think tanking flow of thought manner. And by that I mean the story has conceptually solid moments but upon reflection the combined narrative is less plot more shambling gestalt. The words "cohesive" and "consistent" are completely missing from Fear, with Fear 2 likely going even a step further since it's apparently the product of some odd IP losing and gaining process.

The original Fear centres on the adventures of THE POINTMAN, who over the course of the game is blah blah who cares. There's a couple twists but they're all so far from removed from a connective context that you blink at it then shrug. The plot also centres on ALMA, who is not ATMA, a little girl who has psychic powers and they never really explain much of this. The source of her powers, which are far closer to Warhammer 40k Chaos warper stuff than any vision of 'psychic' I've ever heard of, is never really explained. Also she isn't really a little girl by the time she "dies" but they juxtapose the ideas around so as to make you think they somehow impregnated a seven year old. Multiple times. While she was in a coma. She could still talk and yell while in the coma though, since the word coma is entirely utilized for the purposes of making it sound even worse.

But it only gets worse and man oh man, I'm pretty sure Fear 2 isn't going to disappoint. What's even funnier is that for all the attempts at making the story sound heinous and "horror", I actually find the setting outright mundane. I'm not sure if this has to do with the complete higher brain function shut down necessary to absorb the science fiction elements from the story without going into convulsions or if its the general detachment of the horror elements from the primary gameplay which is shooting the bleep bleep bleep out of many dudes.

(note: there are more spoilers than I would usually drop during this review!)

Scary Games Month: Doom 3

Ha, oh man.

Turnabout is fair play, right? If I'm going to talk up Doom the First to the detriment of modern games with modern engines, I should certainly be willing to play Doom 3 right? It is scary games month and what's more scary than the slow, sickening decay of everyone who worked on Doom? You're thinking about Rage, right? But remember, Daikatana ties into this process as well! Daikatana is like a game version of the star wars prequels. I mean, the actual movies, not pod racing on your kinect or something. That analogy doesn't make overly much sense... Doom.
 
Anyway Doom 3 is a 2004 release into the Doom series and an actual new game as opposed to Doom 2, which was honestly just an overlong map pack with some additional small features - but no stage maps, and the lack of maps seriously worsened the game for me. I have no idea why that's such a big thing - Look at it, it's nothing! But Doom 2 didn't have it and I was sad as a fourteen year old. It kinda goes back to how world building mentally works when you're young, but it's entirely a thing.

By modern conventions Doom 3 would probably just be titled Doom, given its status as a remake of the first game. There was a lasting complaint back then that Doom 3 was a horror game out of nowhere, but that just comes off as an issue of gamers not really comprehending what is horror at all. The original Doom maybe doesn't feel spooky when you're a hardened veteran of shooters, but show that shit to most people and it's pretty damn horrifying. I mean episode 1, episode 3 had entire walls made out of screaming people and so on being you were actually in Hell. Mind you Doom 3 went to horror school and picked up all of the tropes, but stuff like jump scares and lights going out when you picked stuff up were in the original game. Shit just moved so slow and randomly I guess people didn't really pick up on it so much as a horror thing. Maybe it's totally a gamer thing though. I see blood sprayed fire hose style across the walls and I think "did the demons like, do that intentionally? It seems like it would be a ton of effort". Whereas a little old granny would be like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

It does go to show you how silly it seems to complain about developers and publishers addressing new games with their original title; Doom 3 isn't, on any level, a fundamental sequel and just calling it Doom would simplify expectations a bit. Or combine both elements and title the game "Doom: Horror Manshooter" then everyone would have known what they were getting into. Maybe just "Doom: Horror manshoot starring tiny flashlight"

Shootember: Hard Reset

 Expectation is a hell of a thing.

Hard Reset was introduced to me as "an old school" FPS game. For me, that means Doom and ... This is not Doom. I'm just saying that right out because Doom is a piece of nostalgia to me that should not be invoked unless a game really feels old school. Maybe Hard Reset is middle-school, which I think is fair to it. It reminds me a bunch of Quake 3. I think this took a ton of my enjoyment right out of Hard Reset's hands, since telling me I'm going to experience Doom again is just so unfair to any game. I'm generally pretty good about nostalgia, having replayed many of the old games I once remembered fondly. But Doom man, Doom just is.

Doom to me is very similar a discussion as the early Sonic the Hedgehog games, with a wealth of features people can't seem to successfully weave together. Lots of callbacks and references, but they never seem to get there. Doom is essentially a 2d game pretending to be 3d, which is in and of itself a big part of why it works. It also features health packs, key cards, ammo attrition elements, back tracking, secret doors, a "lighting engine" that actually does something and a banging sound track that all add up to a surprisingly easy to mentally integrate atmosphere. Demons from Hell, stuff happened, you are shoot man, go forth and SHOOT. What Doom lacked in story, it made up in sentiment. Shoot man wanted to shoot his foes and felt a sense of accomplishment in trekking through each treacherous environment.

I could go on about Doom for hours, but it was fast, it was fluid, it didn't go out of its way to punish you but attrition kept the game tense. Even many modern elements would work fine in Doom, but the atmosphere is what I miss. I also miss, more than anything, the feel of bleak openness - I honestly think the open world sandbox games are much closer in design to Doom than most modern shooters. The games care less about aiming, more about movement and you feel way more powerful in Saint's Row 3 than you do in most FPS games.

If it sounds like I'm being hard on Hard reset in this comparison, I'm not really. I don't know that it's something they intentionally marketed their game to be or if the gaming press just picked up the idea. If there's one thing media loves, it is to A) bash modern fps games since they're the largest or at least most hyped up market B) Decrying the new school, they flip out and claim everything is old school that isn't a big budget AAA shooter.

Which is bizarre - There are different eras of shooters. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blakestone Aliens of Gold and a fair number of other early titles represent a fundamentally old school design. There's also middle ground between now and then, with many of the 'old school' elements actually being stuff from middle era or later games. The first Crysis for example barely feels like Doom but it doesn't feel like a chest high man shooter cinematic set piece game either.

Anyway to summarize what I mean, Hard Reset essentially feels like a middle ground shooter. There are attempts at weaving some Doom like elements into the game, but it also feels like it has many modern elements as well. So like I said, expectation is a Hell of a thing, but once you get past the idea it was aiming to be a mix of all three eras you get a better sense of the game and judge it a bit more fairly. You stop thinking "why aren't I playing Doom, I was promised Doom" and instead think "I'm playing Hard Reset at least, which is better than Rage anyway..."