Wolfenstein 3D Comes To XBLA

[Reevys]

Almost 3 years after Doom, Wolf3D has finally made its way to the Xbox Live Arcade. At the amazing price of only 400 MS points, the game comes with all 6 episodes, leaderboards and a full set of achievements.

[Linguica]

"File Size: 197 MB"

lol wtf

[TheeXile]

Linguica said:

"File Size: 197 MB"

lol wtf

Can't let you have too much free space on your hard drive. Without being able to force people to upgrade they wouldn't make any money.

[Edward850]

Dam, I'm 50 MS points off from buying this.

Sorry

This offer is not valid in your region, or it has expired.

Okay, now I'm confused. There's no reason for this to not be available in my country, yet it prevents me from downloading it? That's just pointless.

[chungy]

I should mention that Amazon has XBLA games for purchase with real money (no buying a 500 points card just for a 400 point game, for example), although it doesn't yet have Wolf3D on there; probably because it's just recently released though.

[Bucket]

I've said it once, I'll say it again: Wolf3D doesn't age well like Doom does. Having the patience to complete more than one episode takes serious effort.

[Tuthill351]

Bucket said:

I've said it once, I'll say it again: Wolf3D doesn't age well like Doom does. Having the patience to complete more than one episode takes serious effort.

yea i agree i used to play it on return to castle wolfenstien for xbox you need to devote A LOT of time to complete a couple levels let alone an entire episode. the cool thing about the xbla verison is that it comes with the new wolfenstien trailer

[Sporku]

the cool thing about the xbla verison is that it comes with the new wolfenstien trailer

that explains the unnecessarily large file size for the game. sounds kinda pointless, too. can't you watch the trailer anywhere?

wolf3d is only truly entertaining if you play it on the hardest difficulty. even then it's still a grueling mazefest. i wouldn't mind it quite as much if they had just bothered to add some kind of automap.

[Nes]

I played the three map demo, and there are a few quirks in this port.

The most noticeable problem is that the music is slow. Really slow. And it's noticeable.

Second is not something to whine about, but kinda ruins the authentic Wolf3D experience: Recently the Red Cross was whining about games using the "red cross" as a symbol. So Nerve decided to go ahead and replace it with a heart symbol.

But look on the bright side, the achievements tie into some weapon upgrade system currency in the new Wolfenstein game. So it MIGHT be a good investment for those who want to play that.

Oh yeah, and 197 MB. I'm guessing over 190 MB of it went to the trailer.

[Jello]

Yeah I bought it, so what, you want to make a big deal about it? I had some leftover points, and I thought playing Wolf on the 360 might be fun. And it is enjoyable enough. I've found that it suffers from some slowdown though, and on a 360 playing a 17 year old game I can't imagine how the hell that happened. Most noticeably is when opening secret walls, you'll click on them, the game will wait a second, and then the wall will move and the moving sound will start. It's not much, but it's such a delay compared to a Tandy 386 it's amazing it got past the drawing room floor. It's even more odd when you consider Doom works fantastically on the 360. It does, as previously stated, give you money to use in the upcoming Wolf game though, so take that as you will. It does point out a new fact about the game though, money can be used for upgrades.

Edit: Oh, and Nes, thanks for pointing out the red cross being replaced with a heart. I haven't played Wolf 3D in years, but when I saw the health kits I knew something was wrong but didn't quite place it. It seems completely ridiculous, everyone in the world who sees a red cross will instantly recognize it as symbol for help. No reason to change it, and I can't see how they can justify copyrighting a red cross. Hopefully Id won't go back and replace all the symbols on the stimpacks and medkits with a heart.

Also, not sure if it was the same in the original, as I haven't played it in a few years, but in the XBLA version you can't back over items to collect them. You have to walk into them facing forwards. I don't recall that from the original, but I may be wrong.

[Tuthill351]

Nes said:

The most noticeable problem is that the music is slow. Really slow. And it's noticeable.

trailer.

it was the same way in xbla Doom as well music some music is slow and you can notice it

[Scuba Steve]

Jello said:

Also, not sure if it was the same in the original, as I haven't played it in a few years, but in the XBLA version you can't back over items to collect them. You have to walk into them facing forwards. I don't recall that from the original, but I may be wrong.

That's the same for the original PC version, too.

[caco_killer]

I enjoy the game until I get lost, then I get really bored. I've only managed to finish one episode so far.

[Reevys]

I was a penny short of buying it. Over here in the UK, it costs £4.25 to but 500 MS points, and sadly I had £4.24 in my bank. So until Sunday, I can't get this. Sad face.

[chungy]

Well I got the game; good port faithful like the Doom port, but if there's one thing that bugs me about both the Wolf3D and Doom ports, the lack of auto-save between levels. Call me spoiled, but I like being able to turn off the console without having to explicitly save, then come back to the same level when I turn it on again (granted, it will be the beginning of the level, but heh)

[sgtcrispy]

Just seen it was on PSN today, so I grabbed it. 4.99 iirc.

202 mb on this end btw.

[Per-Scan]

I bought it in the vain hope that Nerve might actually bother their arse to port it decently. Seeing that DooM on the 360 is the laziest cash-in of any of the older games on XBLA I should have known better. Why does this game slow down? Why is the button mapping crap (and not configurable...)? Why haven't they even bothered to put a nice border on the 4:3 display...?

I don't understand why they couldn't have it running full speed with higher res textures and an automap. With a wee bit of effort this could've been a great opportunity to upgrade the game and bring it a little more up-to-date. I think they should go back and look at the Duke 3D port - that's how to do it! Lazy, lazy, lazy... :(

[Reevys]

I should also note that the file size is a mere 34MB here in the UK, so I assume our version lacks the new Wolfenstein trailer. Still, it takes up 11MB more than Doom, so I'm a bit confuzzled on how that happened.

[caco_killer]

PFL said:

Seeing that DooM on the 360 is the laziest cash-in of any of the older games on XBLA I should have known better.

What's so bad about the XBLA version of Doom? I didn't see anything wrong with it.

[Nes]

caco_killer said:

What's so bad about the XBLA version of Doom? I didn't see anything wrong with it.

It's not ZDoom?

[Per-Scan]

caco_killer said:

What's so bad about the XBLA version of Doom? I didn't see anything wrong with it.

It doesn't have a great frame rate, the music is slow, there's no configurable layout for the controls, online multiplayer is laggy as feck. They couldn't even think of decent Achievments and didn't bother with a 'nice border for the 4:3 display or (shock horror!) even give a widescreen option...

If this port had been done as homebrew I would probably be happy enough to have DooM on another platform but since this is a commercial effort by a professional company who charge money it's a bit shit... Oh, and as Nes says it's not zDooM! :)

PS: sorry fo the OT rant.

[Reevys]

I didn't mind that the controls weren't configurable, as I thought they were awesome controls anyway. Sure they could use a bit of work, but that's exactly what I did when I started using the 360 controller to play Doom on my PC anyway.

I didn't find the online to be that laggy either, but I do agree with you on the achievements, they were so easy to get it's unbelievable. Still, for only 400 MS points, it could have been a lot worse.

Let's just hope they fix or improve all these things if they ever release Doom II.

[caco_killer]

We must be playing different games, because I don't remember anything being slow in that version of Doom.

[sgtcrispy]

caco_killer said:

We must be playing different games, because I don't remember anything being slow in that version of Doom.

I haven't played Doom on the 360 for a while now, but I don't remember it slowing down. Maybe a hiccup or two possibly but not a full on massive frame drop. But I could be wrong. Some of the music was a tad slow though.

[Reevys]

caco_killer said:

We must be playing different games, because I don't remember anything being slow in that version of Doom.

Indeed, there wasn't anything slow in my version either. Well, the screen melt was slow, as was the weapon transitions, but that's it.

[Dco16]

I'll stick with my NDS port of Wolf, only because the GBA version is just a little too slow.

[ReFracture]

TheeXile said:

Can't let you have too much free space on your hard drive. Without being able to force people to upgrade they wouldn't make any money.

Good thing I bought it on PSN. :P

[SYS]

I was playing the PS3 port on a friend's console last night. Comparing with what I'm reading here of the 360, the PS3 seems to be the better of the two ports. It almost makes up for that godawful SNES Wolfenstein port that should've never happened.