An exceptional take on Classic Doom. What are your recent examples??

[Maes]

Speaking of unusual Doom opinions, there was an old review from 1994, made by some guy who was obviously specialized in RPGs, and the old saying that "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" couldn't have been truer in his case. He just couldn't accept Doom for what it was, aka not an RPG, and kept looking (and missing) for stuff that simply was never meant to be there.

Edited May 29, 2020 by Maes

[doomsucksass]

55 minutes ago, Maes said:

Speaking of unusual Doom opinions, there was an old review from 1994, made by some guy who was obviously specialized in RPGs, and the old saying that "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" couldn't have been truer in his case. He just couldn't accept Doom for what it was, aka not an RPG, and kept looking (and missing) for stuff that simply was never meant to be there.

Was it the infamous "If only you could talk to the demons" one?

Edited May 29, 2020 by doomsucksass

[Doomkid]

56 minutes ago, Maes said:

Speaking of unusual Doom opinions, there was an old review from 1994, made by some guy who was obviously specialized in RPGs, and the old saying that "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" couldn't have been truer in his case. He just couldn't accept Doom for what it was, aka not an RPG, and kept looking (and missing) for stuff that simply was never meant to be there.

This rings a vague bell - something about Doom having "hollow gameplay" because you weren't able to reason with the demons before they tried to kill you or something along those lines. Maybe I'm thinking of a different one, though..

EDIT @doomsucksass nailed it

 

12 hours ago, TheMightyHeracross said:

making a thread circle-jerking what a bad take it is is juvenile.

One man's juvenility is another man's comedy! I know the whole circlejerk thing isn't a great look.. but it's just too damn entertaining. Sometimes, anyway.

Edited May 29, 2020 by Doomkid

[arnaldocsf]

4 minutes ago, doomsucksass said:

Was it the infamous "If only you could talk to the demons" one?

 

Just did a little Google Search: https://web.archive.org/web/20120104155012/http:/www.next-gen.biz/reviews/doom-review 
 

For anyone who might be interested

[Pechudin]

8 minutes ago, arnaldocsf said:

 

Just did a little Google Search: https://web.archive.org/web/20120104155012/http:/www.next-gen.biz/reviews/doom-review 
 

For anyone who might be interested

 

    You know, I have heard myths and legends about this article, but this is surprisingly sober. It did take me a while to understand what he was talking about when the article mentioned 'green bad guys' heh.

[NoXion]

I don't think anyone here is genuinely upset over the obviously wrong opinions* expressed by our anonymous opinion-holder in the OP. My reaction was mainly bemusement, plus some additional pondering. 

So if this was a troll, then so what? Oh no, some stranger on the internet made me think for a little bit about something related to a game I'm interested in. Oh nose, I've been totally owned epic styleeeee.

*(Yes, opinions can be wrong. Claiming factually incorrect bullshit as your opinion does not change its truth value, nor does it shield such opinions from criticism)

[mrthejoshmon]

46 minutes ago, arnaldocsf said:

 

Just did a little Google Search: https://web.archive.org/web/20120104155012/http:/www.next-gen.biz/reviews/doom-review 
 

For anyone who might be interested

Green Lizards?

 

Was he playing Corridor 7 and nobody had the heart to tell him? Were they Zombiemen?

Parallax Scrolling? Is that a feature of Doom?

Clipping sprites in three axes? There were axes?

Why we talking about 2D shoot em ups?

Talk to the literal forces of Hell? Form alliances? Make friends? What?

 

Jesus Christ, Doom the Way Tom Hall Did project when.

[taufan99]

7 minutes ago, mrthejoshmon said:

Jesus Christ, Doom the Way Tom Hall Did project when.

It's that time again! Yes, the time to tell people about the "Doom Bible curse".

[Woolie Wool]

10 minutes ago, mrthejoshmon said:

Jesus Christ, Doom the Way Tom Hall Did project when.

There have been many attempts, and all of them crashed on the rocks of the Doom Bible actually being a pretty crappy game design.

 

Also the ResetEra take in the OP is a boring, low effort troll. Why accept cheap imitations when you can have Ashley Pomeroy's post-post-post-postmodernist masterpiece of theory poisoning, the hottest, spiciest take ever made, the VAGINA DENTATA OF DOOM.

Spoiler

Hurt Me Plenty: The Vagina Dentata of Doom

 

Doom was and remains a spiritual game, a sensation which bypasses the rational mind to pierce the heart and loins. To play Doom is to become a nothing; to occupy a chair, not moving, not blinking, aware of motion and of killing and of void, a static progression of sound and fury.

 

Doom was a refinement of Gauntlet, Atari's 1985 arcade hit. Gauntlet was viewed from a slightly inclined top-down perspective, and was resolutely set in the timeless fantasy era of the Conan films. Both games took place in a series of maze-like environments, both games featured a wide range of opponents, each with different attributes and methods of attack, and furthermore both games came alive when played by four people simultaneously.

 

Doom possessed a quality Gauntlet definitely did not exhibit, a quality stemming from its realism and from its first-person perspective. Playing Gauntlet, one was constantly aware that one was directing a character, moreso when one was playing with other people; in contrast, the multi-player networks that ran four-player Doom could be spread across a building, the players never meeting, whilst Gauntlet required four people to crowd around a small cabinet. Doom instead created a state for which there is no word. I use the term unbecomingness. Most computer games involve and immerse the player in an imaginary world, where the player assumes the role of an imaginary character. This is not unbecomingness, however, it is merely the subsumation of one identity (the player's real-world persona) with that of another (the player character's other-word persona). In contrast, Doom shares a characteristic with many early computer games, in that the player character does not exist, or is so barely sketched as to be immaterial. Although the player assumes the role of a Space Marine, this space marine exists purely as a series of primal grunts, issued at moments of great stress. Although human, the space marine is no more expressive than the monsters he fights. The environment, meanwhile, is overpoweringly evocative, a literal bloodbath, an oxygenated medium.

 

Doom is a symphony of annihilation, for the game's primary characteristic is obliteration. Obliteration of the enemy, of the player, and of the player's self. The archetypal in-game situation finds the player opening a door on a large room filled with monsters, all of whom immediately attack. There is no requirement for the player to destroy all monsters, as the object of the game is to escape from the bowels of hell, yet a variety of subtle cues - the player is constantly armed, the monsters never retreat, violent heavy metal music plays throughout - ensure that there is no question in the player's mind of what must be done, and to whom. Throughout history countless soldiers have been ordered to take care of prisoners - "you know what to do" being the most common formulation - and Doom is no exception. The player knows what to do, even if the game does not explicitly say so. And the doing is good. Doom's sensory assault creates a state of unbecomingness in the player. From moment to moment all that exists are the monsters, the ongoing chatter of the chaingun, the periodic boom of the shotgun, the amplified sensation of movement, and that is the extent of the player's world. There is no thought or mind, there is no sex, no urge to visit the toilet or to ejaculate. The player's body becomes merely a shelf upon which the player's eyes and hands rest.

 

Of course, this unbecomingness is in itself a form of becomingness, for the removal of life's complexities produces a state akin to that of the surfer, the mountain climber, the drug user or the bricklayer; the goal of all men is the amplification of the moment until it obliterates memory and temporality, a state usually achieved through music, food or television. The audience wants to be transported into a similar state of nothingness, thus achieving a glimpse into the undiscovered country of death itself, the infinity of zero. Doom is a game in which the player, by creating death, experiences it from the inside.

 

Doom is also a powerfully erotic game, notwithstanding the numbing of the physical self. It is mentally erotic, capturing the release of control at the height of orgasm, the constant stimulation of eternal deathmaking. Doom bathes and is bathed in sex, from the sated groans and cries of dying soldiers and dying creatures, to the gentle, substantial thud of mortally-wounded demons falling to the floor, to the organic, ejaculatory sound of flesh rupturing into the oblivion of an explosion. Doom captures the eroticism of the slaughterhouse. Many people have fantasies of being killed, of killing oneself, whilst at the height of orgasm, or of killing a partner during sex. Many people achieve release by killing animals, in order to experience the release and relaxation of the death orgasm. Doom's killing acts act as constant stimulation, the unremitting intensity of nightmare mode creating a sensation similar to that of greatly extended masturbation; a mixture of hopeless anxiety, horror and release, the sexual organs requiring greater and greater stimulation to achieve a dread orgasm of painful intensity.

 

Doom is a male space. The player is invariably male, for obvious reasons. Of the monsters, only the comical Cacodemons seem obviously female, their ungainly, ill-formed gaseous nature and leering, slavering mouths characteristic of the female species. The other creatures are powerfully muscular or obviously male, and Doom's erotic power stems from the unrestrained physicality epitomised by violent homosexual intercourse. Men are not easily capable of multiple, satisfying orgasms, each one lesser than the last, and thus homosexual sex must be extraordinarily intense in order to make the most of the moment. Doom's amplification of unimaginable horror fits this pattern, with the addition that there is no real orgasm, even unto the final level of the episode. Death is the end, the ultimate, the one and only, but the death of the player in Doom is treated merely as a pause, a tap to the space bar restarting the level, although the player would be wiser reloading an earlier saved game.

 

One of Doom's innovations was the fact that the corpses of vanquished monsters do not vanish, either immediately or over a period of time. They remain in place, monuments to the player's conquests, lying peacefully on the floor, drenched in blood, in many cases opening their legs to the player (a side-effect of Doom's graphic engine ensures that static sprites always offer one face to the player, just as the Moon always faces Earth). Fluid plays a major part in Doom's gameplay, each monster producing large quantities of it during death, whilst other fluids harm the player. That none of these fluids are obviously seminal is telling; although very few fluids in real life have the texture and consistency of semen, Doom is a game that denies reality, set as it is in a fantasy world. The presence of blue water seems jarring in the midst of hellish insanity, and thus the absence of semen was quite obviously a conscious decision on the part of the programmes for censorship reasons, the same reason for the lack of visible genitalia on the obviously naked monsters (although, having said that, as the monsters seem optimised for combat it is entirely possible that their genitals are hidden, like the Dolphin or the Zebra).

The player is represented throughout the game by the aforementioned grunts, a pained facial expression in the status bar, and a centrally-placed weapon, most typically a pump-action shotgun with an infinitely large magazine. It would have been easy for the programmers to symbolise sexuality with these most obvious sexual symbols, and it is to their credit that they avoid sexualising the weapons, or at least the majority of them. When the player picks up the chainsaw for the first time, an instruction to find some meat appears on the screen, yet the chainsaw does not penetrate the enemy, it merely strokes the enemy, brushes their skin. It has a woman's touch.

 

The chainsaw is the purest of all Doom's weapons. Whilst the majority of the game's weapons are neutral, the player choosing to use them or not as the situation demands, the chainsaw is a persuasive force of itself, its very appearance and manner an inducement to violence. Even in situations where the chainsaw is tactically inadvisable, the player is tempted to apply it; even in situations where there are no obvious monsters, its constant low-level buzz promises violence to come, purring and roaring like a new-born child. It is not a cyclic weapon, and it does not run out, notwithstanding the in-game lack of petrol. As in real life, Doom's chainsaw is a constant neverending stream of wailing death, of blood and torture. An industrial tool repositioned as a combat weapon, taken from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Evil Dead 2. Indeed, as with underground horror and hard core pornography, the optimal medium for experiencing Doom would, if possible, be that of a video, of a fourth-generation video copy of an Dutch print dubbed into French, with a tacked-on production credit and no ending credits.

 

That so many subsequent upgrades and patches for Doom have concentrated on making the game look even better seems to miss the point. Doom is a dirty game, dirty dirty girl. Like so many pleasurable things - sex, prolonged defecation, eating, mummification, Mork and Mindy - Doom is tacky and shameful, but knowing with it. In this respect its most obvious follow-up was a competing product, Duke Nukem 3D, a game less focussed on the killing act, but enlivened with obvious references - and indeed dialogue samples - from the films which inspired Doom. In Duke the player was encouraged to identify with the title character, a macho, sexist boor, a mistake which Doom did not make. It was not the machismo or the boorishness that was the mistake, but the fact that this path was obviously chosen for the player in advance. In Doom, the player is carefully drawn to the path of violence in such a way that he believes himself to have chosen the path willingly, and that at any time he could have backed out, but he chose not to. One lesson of history is that people rebel against authority but can be made to do terrible, glorious things if they imagine that the choice was theirs; it is therefore the goal of authority to indirectly direct the people to make the right decision.

 

Yet the most enduring choices, the easiest to make, are those forced by biological necessity. No-one would chose to spit if there were a simpler way to remove the taste of metal, and fundamentally very few people choose to die, yet people do die. And people kill. Our minds are at the mercy of our bodies; Doom is a game of pure mind, a game that makes the body irrelevant. Doom is the ultimate choice, a potent mixture of erotic power and violent action, a path which draws the player on, a path which cannot be untaken.

 

 

Edited May 29, 2020 by Woolie Wool

[DuckReconMajor]

1 hour ago, Pechudin said:

It did take me a while to understand what he was talking about when the article mentioned 'green bad guys' heh.

 

What is it? I have no idea.

[Biodegradable]

20 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

There have been many attempts, and all of them crashed on the rocks of the Doom Bible actually being a pretty crappy game design.

 

Also the ResetEra take in the OP is a boring, low effort troll. Why accept cheap imitations when you can have Ashley Pomeroy's post-post-post-postmodernist masterpiece of theory poisoning, the hottest, spiciest take ever made, the VAGINA DENTATA OF DOOM.

  Hide contents

<The penultimate wordsalad of most excellent verbosity>

 

Thank you for this, Wool. This is the funniest thing I've read all week. Bless you

 

[Pechudin]

17 minutes ago, DuckReconMajor said:

 

What is it? I have no idea.

    I suppose it is the Former Humans, because of the green hair.

[P41R47]

26 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

There have been many attempts, and all of them crashed on the rocks of the Doom Bible actually being a pretty crappy game design.

 

Also the ResetEra take in the OP is a boring, low effort troll. Why accept cheap imitations when you can have Ashley Pomeroy's post-post-post-postmodernist masterpiece of theory poisoning, the hottest, spiciest take ever made, the VAGINA DENTATA OF DOOM.

  Reveal hidden contents

Hurt Me Plenty: The Vagina Dentata of Doom

 

Doom was and remains a spiritual game, a sensation which bypasses the rational mind to pierce the heart and loins. To play Doom is to become a nothing; to occupy a chair, not moving, not blinking, aware of motion and of killing and of void, a static progression of sound and fury.

 

Doom was a refinement of Gauntlet, Atari's 1985 arcade hit. Gauntlet was viewed from a slightly inclined top-down perspective, and was resolutely set in the timeless fantasy era of the Conan films. Both games took place in a series of maze-like environments, both games featured a wide range of opponents, each with different attributes and methods of attack, and furthermore both games came alive when played by four people simultaneously.

 

Doom possessed a quality Gauntlet definitely did not exhibit, a quality stemming from its realism and from its first-person perspective. Playing Gauntlet, one was constantly aware that one was directing a character, moreso when one was playing with other people; in contrast, the multi-player networks that ran four-player Doom could be spread across a building, the players never meeting, whilst Gauntlet required four people to crowd around a small cabinet. Doom instead created a state for which there is no word. I use the term unbecomingness. Most computer games involve and immerse the player in an imaginary world, where the player assumes the role of an imaginary character. This is not unbecomingness, however, it is merely the subsumation of one identity (the player's real-world persona) with that of another (the player character's other-word persona). In contrast, Doom shares a characteristic with many early computer games, in that the player character does not exist, or is so barely sketched as to be immaterial. Although the player assumes the role of a Space Marine, this space marine exists purely as a series of primal grunts, issued at moments of great stress. Although human, the space marine is no more expressive than the monsters he fights. The environment, meanwhile, is overpoweringly evocative, a literal bloodbath, an oxygenated medium.

 

Doom is a symphony of annihilation, for the game's primary characteristic is obliteration. Obliteration of the enemy, of the player, and of the player's self. The archetypal in-game situation finds the player opening a door on a large room filled with monsters, all of whom immediately attack. There is no requirement for the player to destroy all monsters, as the object of the game is to escape from the bowels of hell, yet a variety of subtle cues - the player is constantly armed, the monsters never retreat, violent heavy metal music plays throughout - ensure that there is no question in the player's mind of what must be done, and to whom. Throughout history countless soldiers have been ordered to take care of prisoners - "you know what to do" being the most common formulation - and Doom is no exception. The player knows what to do, even if the game does not explicitly say so. And the doing is good. Doom's sensory assault creates a state of unbecomingness in the player. From moment to moment all that exists are the monsters, the ongoing chatter of the chaingun, the periodic boom of the shotgun, the amplified sensation of movement, and that is the extent of the player's world. There is no thought or mind, there is no sex, no urge to visit the toilet or to ejaculate. The player's body becomes merely a shelf upon which the player's eyes and hands rest.

 

Of course, this unbecomingness is in itself a form of becomingness, for the removal of life's complexities produces a state akin to that of the surfer, the mountain climber, the drug user or the bricklayer; the goal of all men is the amplification of the moment until it obliterates memory and temporality, a state usually achieved through music, food or television. The audience wants to be transported into a similar state of nothingness, thus achieving a glimpse into the undiscovered country of death itself, the infinity of zero. Doom is a game in which the player, by creating death, experiences it from the inside.

 

Doom is also a powerfully erotic game, notwithstanding the numbing of the physical self. It is mentally erotic, capturing the release of control at the height of orgasm, the constant stimulation of eternal deathmaking. Doom bathes and is bathed in sex, from the sated groans and cries of dying soldiers and dying creatures, to the gentle, substantial thud of mortally-wounded demons falling to the floor, to the organic, ejaculatory sound of flesh rupturing into the oblivion of an explosion. Doom captures the eroticism of the slaughterhouse. Many people have fantasies of being killed, of killing oneself, whilst at the height of orgasm, or of killing a partner during sex. Many people achieve release by killing animals, in order to experience the release and relaxation of the death orgasm. Doom's killing acts act as constant stimulation, the unremitting intensity of nightmare mode creating a sensation similar to that of greatly extended masturbation; a mixture of hopeless anxiety, horror and release, the sexual organs requiring greater and greater stimulation to achieve a dread orgasm of painful intensity.

 

Doom is a male space. The player is invariably male, for obvious reasons. Of the monsters, only the comical Cacodemons seem obviously female, their ungainly, ill-formed gaseous nature and leering, slavering mouths characteristic of the female species. The other creatures are powerfully muscular or obviously male, and Doom's erotic power stems from the unrestrained physicality epitomised by violent homosexual intercourse. Men are not easily capable of multiple, satisfying orgasms, each one lesser than the last, and thus homosexual sex must be extraordinarily intense in order to make the most of the moment. Doom's amplification of unimaginable horror fits this pattern, with the addition that there is no real orgasm, even unto the final level of the episode. Death is the end, the ultimate, the one and only, but the death of the player in Doom is treated merely as a pause, a tap to the space bar restarting the level, although the player would be wiser reloading an earlier saved game.

 

One of Doom's innovations was the fact that the corpses of vanquished monsters do not vanish, either immediately or over a period of time. They remain in place, monuments to the player's conquests, lying peacefully on the floor, drenched in blood, in many cases opening their legs to the player (a side-effect of Doom's graphic engine ensures that static sprites always offer one face to the player, just as the Moon always faces Earth). Fluid plays a major part in Doom's gameplay, each monster producing large quantities of it during death, whilst other fluids harm the player. That none of these fluids are obviously seminal is telling; although very few fluids in real life have the texture and consistency of semen, Doom is a game that denies reality, set as it is in a fantasy world. The presence of blue water seems jarring in the midst of hellish insanity, and thus the absence of semen was quite obviously a conscious decision on the part of the programmes for censorship reasons, the same reason for the lack of visible genitalia on the obviously naked monsters (although, having said that, as the monsters seem optimised for combat it is entirely possible that their genitals are hidden, like the Dolphin or the Zebra).

The player is represented throughout the game by the aforementioned grunts, a pained facial expression in the status bar, and a centrally-placed weapon, most typically a pump-action shotgun with an infinitely large magazine. It would have been easy for the programmers to symbolise sexuality with these most obvious sexual symbols, and it is to their credit that they avoid sexualising the weapons, or at least the majority of them. When the player picks up the chainsaw for the first time, an instruction to find some meat appears on the screen, yet the chainsaw does not penetrate the enemy, it merely strokes the enemy, brushes their skin. It has a woman's touch.

 

The chainsaw is the purest of all Doom's weapons. Whilst the majority of the game's weapons are neutral, the player choosing to use them or not as the situation demands, the chainsaw is a persuasive force of itself, its very appearance and manner an inducement to violence. Even in situations where the chainsaw is tactically inadvisable, the player is tempted to apply it; even in situations where there are no obvious monsters, its constant low-level buzz promises violence to come, purring and roaring like a new-born child. It is not a cyclic weapon, and it does not run out, notwithstanding the in-game lack of petrol. As in real life, Doom's chainsaw is a constant neverending stream of wailing death, of blood and torture. An industrial tool repositioned as a combat weapon, taken from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Evil Dead 2. Indeed, as with underground horror and hard core pornography, the optimal medium for experiencing Doom would, if possible, be that of a video, of a fourth-generation video copy of an Dutch print dubbed into French, with a tacked-on production credit and no ending credits.

 

That so many subsequent upgrades and patches for Doom have concentrated on making the game look even better seems to miss the point. Doom is a dirty game, dirty dirty girl. Like so many pleasurable things - sex, prolonged defecation, eating, mummification, Mork and Mindy - Doom is tacky and shameful, but knowing with it. In this respect its most obvious follow-up was a competing product, Duke Nukem 3D, a game less focussed on the killing act, but enlivened with obvious references - and indeed dialogue samples - from the films which inspired Doom. In Duke the player was encouraged to identify with the title character, a macho, sexist boor, a mistake which Doom did not make. It was not the machismo or the boorishness that was the mistake, but the fact that this path was obviously chosen for the player in advance. In Doom, the player is carefully drawn to the path of violence in such a way that he believes himself to have chosen the path willingly, and that at any time he could have backed out, but he chose not to. One lesson of history is that people rebel against authority but can be made to do terrible, glorious things if they imagine that the choice was theirs; it is therefore the goal of authority to indirectly direct the people to make the right decision.

 

Yet the most enduring choices, the easiest to make, are those forced by biological necessity. No-one would chose to spit if there were a simpler way to remove the taste of metal, and fundamentally very few people choose to die, yet people do die. And people kill. Our minds are at the mercy of our bodies; Doom is a game of pure mind, a game that makes the body irrelevant. Doom is the ultimate choice, a potent mixture of erotic power and violent action, a path which draws the player on, a path which cannot be untaken.

 

 

Wow, thanks for this! Its a masterpice, indeed. The kind of essays i would like to read more often around here.

Simply amazing and summarizes pretty much all that i was writing about the perverse, sadistic and powerfully erotic pleasure Doom brings on every death.

 

I wonder if Gusta & Method know of this article. Because Kama Sutra its the prime example of it.

 

[TakenStew22]

4 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

Wait we're supposed to focus on the post in the OP and not talk about notable hot takes? You mean I suffered Gaming In The Clinton Years for nothing?

 

Wack.

 

And I was even going to note the horrifying tragedy of one "Micheal P. Shipley" and his untimely demise.

 

 

 

God bless this poor man, wrong words in the wrong place.

 

  Hide contents

I forgot to crop the ifunny watermark please forgive me

 

The comment was also in my favorite track of the game lol.

[Steve D]

One part that amuses me about the troll post in the OP is the inclusion of Halo as a console game. It is, but that's not how it started out.

 

I began my computing life with PowerMacs back in the mid-'90s, so I was well aware of Bungie. All of us MacHeads were supposed to love Bungie because they were a Mac game developer and were actually successful, which at the time seemed like mutually exclusive things. Well, okay, there was Myst. ;D

 

I was already a MacDoomer by the time Marathon 2 came out. I was initially excited by this game because it was a Mac-exclusive shooter from Bungie and it had notable technological advantages over Doom, including freelook, deep liquids, currents, and scripting. For example, I remember a map where a bunch of NPCs said something like, "There he is! Let's get him!" and then came running up some steps. In other places items dropped down from the ceiling, and the game also had very colorful textures. Even the opening moments of the game, where you appear alongside other space troopers who kill the first wave of enemies for you, say a few words, and then beam back up to the mother ship, demonstrated its technological advances by comparison to Doom. Marathon 2 also had story elements built into various consoles you had to activate, as well as medical stations where you brought your health back up, perhaps the first shooter to develop that feature. All in all, impressive stuff, and yet I never liked the game. I disliked the enemy animation in particular, as well as the seemingly endless and confusing maps. 

 

When Bungie ported Marathon 2 to Windows, there was a predictable hue and cry from those accusing them of abandoning the platform, and this was also said of their Myth franchise, which appeared simultaneously on Windows and Mac.

 

Which brings us to Halo. The Mac mags did their duty by promoting Halo as a Mac game that would blow everyone away. By this time the first two Quake games had been released, so Halo was seen as an opportunity to leap ahead of id and put Mac gaming into the technological lead once again. The Mac gaming community was totally stoked over this crushing victory that seemed so tantalizingly close, until . . .

 

. . . the Great Satan himself, Bill Gates, bought Bungie, moved them from Chicago to Redmond, and made Halo a console game for the Xbox.

 

Oh, the humanity!!!!!

 

There the Mac gaming community was, staring aghast as defeat was snatched from the slavering jaws of victory, a blow from which, I'd guess, they never recovered. You can't blame Bungie, for they got rich as hell off the deal. And give credit where it's due to Microsoft, for they knew a winner when they saw one. I personally don't like Halo, but I don't begrudge others for liking it. People dig what they dig. I dig Doom, and not much else. But I thought the post was a good excuse for telling the Halo story from the perspective of the perpetually disappointed Mac Gaming Community. ;)

Edited May 29, 2020 by Steve D

[DuckReconMajor]

I like the Halo games I've played but it always aggravated me people lumped on Call of Duty criticisms that should have been leveled at the Halo games, at least the first one. The slow, floaty movement, the regenerating health, the cookie cutter environments and hallways. I still enjoy it to some extent for whatever reason, not having a nostalgia for it since I didn't play any of the game until Reach came out. But the qualms people have with it I think are more than justified.

 

@Steve D I always thought it odd they went from the mac game company to the xbox company and I'm glad to know more about that now.

[Steve D]

I played a bit of Halo when it was finally ported to PC, and was stunned by how awful the buildings looked, and then by how much I disliked the game itself with all its cutesy-poo qualities. Gag me! ;D But hey, the Ringworld! :)

 

And just to be cantankerous and off-topic, I didn't like Half-Life, either, but Return To Castle Wolfenstein was enjoyable to me.

[Maes]

4 hours ago, doomsucksass said:

Was it the infamous "If only you could talk to the demons" one?

 

Yes. In retrospect, even that part of the "review" was bullshit, since how many RPGs do you know where you can really "talk to the demons", monsters or mobs? If you ever bother to use the talk command on random encounters,  typically you receive a "You receive no reply" message or, at best, some canned message, usually taunts or threats, especially if the mob is already aggro.

[Dark Pulse]

On 5/28/2020 at 8:04 AM, Danzer said:

How is "Find some meat" toxic masculinity?

Well, clearly the idea is to bury your long object into some wet, hot flesh...

[ReaperAA]

1 hour ago, Steve D said:

The Mac gaming community was totally stoked over this crushing victory that seemed so tantalizingly close, until . . .

 

. . . the Great Satan himself, Bill Gates, bought Bungie, moved them from Chicago to Redmond, and made Halo a console game for the Xbox.

 

Oh, the humanity!!!!!

 

There the Mac gaming community was, staring aghast as defeat was snatched from the slavering jaws of victory, a blow from which, I'd guess, they never recovered. You can't blame Bungie, for they got rich as hell off the deal. And give credit where it's due to Microsoft, for they knew a winner when they saw one. I personally don't like Halo, but I don't begrudge others for liking it. People dig what they dig. I dig Doom, and not much else. But I thought the post was a good excuse for telling the Halo story from the perspective of the perpetually disappointed Mac Gaming Community. ;)

 

On one hand, I feel sorry for the mac community. But on the other hand, the rabid Apple fans (particularly Marathon fans) kinda deserved it for shitting on Doom just so that they can make their platform look superior.

 

[Steve D]

53 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

 

On one hand, I feel sorry for the mac community. But on the other hand, the rabid Apple fans (particularly Marathon fans) kinda deserved it for shitting on Doom just so that they can make their platform look superior.

 

 

As we know, the Mac was -- and is -- not a superior platform for gaming. It's a good platform, especially now that you can run Windows natively, but it will always lag behind in terms of gaming technology, since only a certain percentage of video cards will have Mac versions. Those cards will be aimed at PCs first. As for Marathon, Doom had the last laugh, and about 800 laughs before that. ;)

[arnaldocsf]

48 minutes ago, Steve D said:

 

As we know, the Mac was -- and is -- not a superior platform for gaming. It's a good platform, especially now that you can run Windows natively, but it will always lag behind in terms of gaming technology, since only a certain percentage of video cards will have Mac versions. Those cards will be aimed at PCs first. As for Marathon, Doom had the last laugh, and about 800 laughs before that. ;)

 

This said, Marathon still is a good game. I remember playing Durandal in the early 90's I guess. Good memories. 

Edited May 29, 2020 by arnaldocsf

[Steve D]

4 minutes ago, arnaldocsf said:

 

This sad, Marathon still is a good game. I remember playing Durandal in the early 90's I guess. Good memories. 

 

I'm glad you enjoyed it. The Marathon games weren't for me, but I can see why people liked them, because they had a lot to offer, especially to story-oriented players. Btw, do you remember the Marathon-engine game set in an East European dictatorship? I keep forgetting the name of it. I think the imagery might have been by the same artist who did work for KMFDM.

[Koff3Katt]

Toxic Masculinity: Isn't James Bond like a macho womanizer lol

 

Atrocious Enemy AI: Did they forget these are old early 90s FPS'??? Not much was happening with enemy AI or AI in general for most games back then; I guess Xevious did have some smart difficulty progression algorithm. (Go, Namco!)

 

No Allied AI: In games where solitude enforces the mood of being one of, if not, the last survivors.

 

Appalling art-styles: That's subjective

 

Horrible Music: This too is subjective

 

No dynamic combat: Wolf3D - Not much you can do here. Quake/Doom/Duke - I can see some parts (more for vanilla Doom 1) where things aren't too "dynamic"; however, Doom II and community maps, in general, more than make up for dynamic combat. Half-life: Haven't played in years, so I don't remember much, pretty sure they're wrong anyway.

 

No Co-op: Wolf3D - sure. Doom/Duke - Guess DWANGO was all a dream. Quake - Quakeworld? Never heard of her. I think Half-Life had that decay co-op thing??

 

Edited May 29, 2020 by Koff3Katt

[doomsucksass]

4 hours ago, Steve D said:

the Marathon-engine game set in an East European dictatorship

You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZPC?

Edited May 30, 2020 by doomsucksass

[Steve D]

5 hours ago, doomsucksass said:

You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZPC?

 

Yes! That's it! Thank you!

 

Reading the article brings up all kinds of memories. I lived in Seattle back in the punk days, and saw The Blackouts several times, so it was fascinating to learn that Paul and Roland Barker -- bass and keyboards respectively -- of that band did the music for ZPC. And that music sounded like a combo of KMFDM and Laibach, amusing given that The Blackouts sounded like neither, and were a post-Punk band. Paul Barker eventually went to Chicago along with the Blackouts' drummer, Bill Rieflin, and they joined Ministry.

 

And as you know, Aidan Hughes, aka Brute, is in fact the artist who did work for KMFDM. I remember it so well from the Drug Against War video. What an awesome artist, with such a distinctive style.

 

As for the game, my memory is lots of hitscanners, and watching some gameplay videos confirms that memory. And the animation is in the same robotic style as Marathon. Not something I'd like to re-visit, but the atmosphere was great. So in this case, IMO the art and music definitely exceeded the game. This video seems to capture only the art interludes. Other videos on YouTube show the gameplay.

 

 

 

[arnaldocsf]

16 hours ago, Steve D said:

 

I'm glad you enjoyed it. The Marathon games weren't for me, but I can see why people liked them, because they had a lot to offer, especially to story-oriented players. Btw, do you remember the Marathon-engine game set in an East European dictatorship? I keep forgetting the name of it. I think the imagery might have been by the same artist who did work for KMFDM.

 

I don't know, sorry. 

What I DO know is that Marathon (all 3) are avaible to download for free with a new open source engine.

Downloaded Marathon 2 today, it's beautiful. 

[Steve D]

8 minutes ago, arnaldocsf said:

 

I don't know, sorry. 

What I DO know is that Marathon (all 3) are avaible to download for free with a new open source engine.

Downloaded Marathon 2 today, it's beautiful. 

 

I have that package. Every now and then I poke around in them.

[Vic Vos]

Quote

Resetera

 

[Master O]

20 hours ago, Koff3Katt said:

Toxic Masculinity: Isn't James Bond like a macho womanizer lol

 

Atrocious Enemy AI: Did they forget these are old early 90s FPS'??? Not much was happening with enemy AI or AI in general for most games back then; I guess Xevious did have some smart difficulty progression algorithm. (Go, Namco!)

 

 

Xevious wasn't the first to do that with AI difficulty scaling.  Konami's "Gradius" was.  To compensate for Gradius' notorious difficulty, bosses were pushovers, most notably Gradius' lone boss fight "The Big Core", which is fought on 5 of its 7 levels.

 

 

Edited May 30, 2020 by Master O