Re: I prefer the original
> You're right with Doom 3, they did try to go a different direction with it into survival/horror. Still had some good mechanics tho, the touchscreens were a dream to use, showed us how "every game should do it" if you are going force players to interact with in-game computers.
If I remember correctly, someone actually released a mod which let you play the original Doom on the in-sceen monitors. But annoyingly, nothing's showing up when I search, other than a few people who remember the same thing.
> But what's more interesting to me is the number of comments still praising 1 & 2! Yes they are the de-facto standard, but nostalgia is blinding at times. The way people talk here, you'd think they just played an original Doom session last week! I'm curious as to how many actually have it set up in any capacity, or actually played it within the past year
I can't remember for certain when I last fired Doom up, but it was probably in the last 12 months. I've also been having a blast on Duke Nukem 3D, and I'm currently doing an extended playthrough of a heavily modded Fallout New Vegas, since it's a perfect timesink during these lockdown times.
I've also fairly recently fired up games like HL2, and after the recent article about Command and Conquer, that's on the list for a replay as well.
Though to be fair, I'm probably more of a retro-gamer than the average Reg reader ;)
> Slowly, some of the modern game advancements become apparent: tank controls! You can't even strafe, and suddenly the run-and-gun demon blasting "memory", you realize, was really more of a fantasy, of only your best-ever moments mashed together and viewed from a 10 ft. distance with only the rosiest of glasses.
Are you sure you're talking about Doom? Because you can strafe in Doom. In fact, it was safer to continually strafe, as (thanks to a relatively simple physics model and a bit of ol' Pythagoras's theorems), you travelled faster when moving diagonally. And while it was originally designed around keyboard-only control, it did offer mouselook, which pro-gamers swiftly migrated to.
To be fair, in many ways, video games have drastically improved over the years. Controls are more consistent, user interfaces are more intuitive and developers have generally learned a lot about which gameplay mechanisms are actually fun and how to balance gameplay.
But on the other hand, they've also had a lot more stuff bolted onto them, which can often result in an arguably worse gameplay experience. Microtransactions and DLC are two prime examples, but another facet is that games often feature more mechanisms than their older brethren, as well as more complicated gameplay. Jack of all trades, master of none.
E.g. Fallout 4 had a much heavier emphasis on crafting (and settlement creation) as compared to Fallout NV. And compare the gameplay and tech tree for Command and Conquer to more modern clickfest RTS games such as Starcraft II and the Dawn of War series.
Conversely, the original Doom focused on pure run-and-gun gameplay, and managed to pretty much perfectly accomplish this within the limits of the available technology of the time. Run, shoot, press buttons and take on hordes of enemies who could /mostly/ be taken out with a single shotgun blast if you were skillful enough.
Doom 3 was something of a step back from this, partly because iD was trying to make a more cinematic experience and also because 3D technology just wasn't up to the job of combining highly detailed environments with hordes of enemies. To be fair, it was atmospheric and a pretty impressive technical achievement, but it's like comparing the Alien and Aliens films; one's a thriller-horror while the other's an action movie.
Doom 2016? It was a welcome step back to the faster and more brutal gameplay of the original, but at least for me, I just couldn't get into it. Mostly because of the Glory Kill mechanism; having to stop moving to trigger a distinctly repetitive canned animation quickly got old.
So, yeah. There's a lot of games which are best left to gently decay amid the sands of time. Doom isn't one of them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
