begin oe_protect.scr
Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> __/ [ [H]omer ] on Sunday 25 June 2006 04:00 \__
>
>> TheLetterK wrote:
>>> On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 03:01:21 +0100, [H]omer wrote:
>>
>>>> I think graphics card manufacturers (er ... *both* of them) are
>>>> just clutching at straws trying to figure out how to make people
>>>> upgrade hardware that *really* doesn't need upgraded, ably assisted
>>>> by Microsoft (of course) who happily oblige by bumping version
>>>> numbers to make people believe the upgrade is necessary.
>>
>>> Oh hell no. There's been substantial improvement in the capabilities
>>> of video cards over the past few years. That's one of the few areas
>>> of computer technology that's actually gained new capabilities in
>>> recent years.
>>
>> I remember John Carmack giving a presentation at an Apple Expo about
>> Doom 3, and how he slavered over nVidia's latest toy.
>
>
> Doom 3 did not run quite so gracefully on my modern Raedon. But it gets
> worse....
>
>
>> Being an ID fan, and old Doom-Meister in particular, I bought the
>> game.
>
>
> Why buy when you can try the demo as means of evaluating the game? Having
> grown up as a _huge_ Doom and Doom II addict, I found no assimilation
> between the 'old generation' and the 'new generation' of the game. So
> nostalgia played no role at all. No imps; no chainsaw; no punch; no snorting
> in the background...
I've been using Legacy Doom for several years, firstly on a freedos ipx network
(which I still have, but is rarely used), and then on linux machines. I
still have about 6,000 doom wads - they're small by modern standards,
and even now go back to play them occasionally. The later ones, played
in opengl, were quite attractive, and certain wads had exceptional
dmatch appeal. My kids used to play for hours, although they've
graduated onto quake3 and quake3 mods now, as well as the strategy-style
games like wesnoth.
Legacy doesn't seem to have moved much in ages, I think the team were
trying to port the code-base from C to C++ (couldn't really see the
point, myself), and perhaps got stuck somewhere. They had managed to
get support in for raven games as well, but there were questions around
about the licensing which were never resolved.
The most recent port I've seen is Vavoom, which looks quite interesting,
but does some kind of interim node-build - not entirely sure what it's
doing, but it's not as mature as legacy was.
These days, doom looks dated, even in OpenGL at high res - the gameplay
is still good, but the textures are relatively poor by modern standards,
the sprites are 2d, and the AI for the monsters is not great.
That said, pretty much everything I've heard about Doom III is
dismissive. It appears to fail to capture any of the feel of the
original doom (the first, fully immersive 3D FPS with full sound stage &
surprisingly good music) in much the opposite way compared with return
to castle wolfenstein, which I thought very much took the feel of the
original game (Wolf3D) forward. Wolf3D was a huge leap on from the 2d
version of wolf, which was interesting, but the hardware back then
wasn't up to much.
>
>
>> What a disappointment. What was cited as "atmospheric" turned out to
>> actually just mean "pitch black", and the gameplay was abysmal
>> ... literally boring.
>
>
> Exactly! The whole game is about trying to see the most in pitch-black rooms.
> It's about scare through surprises (visual and audio). What would be the
> point raising the contrast/brightness (old Dooms has gamma correction, F11
> IIRC)?
As do the more recent doom ports, even in opengl modes.
>
>
>> The graphics ... what I could see of it ... looked OK, I suppose.
>
>
> "It's like a big-budget movie with a story that goes nowhere" (Elaine quote).
>
>
>> The icing on the cake was when the game crashed, mid-way through level
>> 2 IIRC. My hardware seemed up to spec (P4 3.6GHz, GF6600GT, 2GB DDR2,
>> XP SP2, latest drivers, latest patches etc.), but no dice.
>>
>> I'm quite sure that from the POV of development, newer APIs and
>> hardware capabilities make game development much easier, but in "user
>> experience" terms for the end user, the differences seem minimal at
>> best, to me at least.
>
>
> Same here. I really miss the games from the olden days when everything was
> developed with quality storylines (Leisure Suit Larry, Monkey Island,
> Goblins...), as well as innovation rather than the aim of sticking in as
> many polygons as possible while retaining decent FPS rate. It's like a
> brute-force battle rather than an attempt to please the audience with
> quality content.
>
Larry was great fun, you can play larry on your linux machine using the
sarien environment, or dosbox and the original game - both seem to work
well.
What I found very interesting about the original doom is that it brought
together the 'adventure' style games, of which larry was one, with the
arcade games (invaders, raptor, 2600 games and so on), so that it had
the stunning graphics and sound-stage of an arcade game, but combined
with intelligent story-lines, puzzles, traps and tricks, and genuine
challenges to get through the original games. The collection of keys to
get through wads, the fascinating use of "secrets" and so on all added
to an excellent game to play just against the computer. This was also
combined with the brilliant idea of networked play, both in cooperative
and in dmatch forms. The dmatch games brought a whole new approach,
basically an arena, and a shedload of independently designed arenas
became very popular - there were thousands written!
I think the problem with doom now is that it has been superseded by the
top-notch quake mods. I've downloaded a couple recently, and they and
some of the older ones are hugely popular with my lads and their friends.
Prison-break is one of the older favourites, with reaction quake and seals
as two very modern favourites, with good game play, excellent graphics,
and new subtleties, like injuries which have to be bandaged but do not
heal, new weapons and so on.
If you want a game with the feel of a doom deathmatch, then I've found
the prison-break mod to be an excellent example.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
Good day to avoid cops. Crawl to work.
|
|
