Saturday, October 20, 2012

FYI

And now for this public service announcement:


That's right, folks. If you've got Doom questions, our friend Doomguy2000 has the answers! And be sure to stop by his webpage to check out his "beast-eye-area" (or bestiary, for you English-speaking members of the audience).

EDIT:

Well, I see our friend has made the above video proclamation private now. Guess he's not in such a sharing mood now, after all...

Thursday, October 18, 2012

I feel so used...

I hadn't intended to post much more about this since I was already certain prior to its release that the Doom 3 BFG Edition would be little more than Zenimax/Bethsoft/id Software simply trying to re-sell to me something that I already have, but now that I've actually had some hands-on experience with the release I feel compelled to post a word of warning.

First and foremost: don't be fooled by all the hype about the "remastered graphics". For the most part these simply consist of hacks or tweaks that modify the lighting. They do make the game look a bit brighter and sharper, but the same effects can be accomplished with the original game through some configuration tweaking or even console commands. If these are remastered graphics, then I've been remastering games myself for almost as long as I've owned a PC. There are some changes to the menus that look nice, but they aren't worth buying a new version of the game for.

Which reminds me: there's no menu option available to easily access mods. Unless they can be activated through console commands, you'll likely have to forget about playing any of your favorite old Doom 3 mods with this version.

The gameplay has obviously been cheapened for the benefit of the console gamers. There's more ammo and health packs laying around and I've noticed a monster or two being absent from where I remember them being in the original. Playing the game on the "Marine" difficulty, I'm in the fourth section of the Alpha Labs already and the only times that I've died were because I fell off bridges. The changes they've made to the flashlight (being able to hold it and a weapon simultaneously) are nice enough, but since the lighting is now brighter in most areas the thing is almost superfluous.

In my opinion, the only redeeming qualities this version of the game has are the new Doom 3 levels (I think there are eight of them, but I haven't even given them a try yet) and the fact that it includes a NO REST FOR THE WICKED .wad file, at last making the Doom 2 add-on available to we PC gamers without needing to pirate it. Are these things worth $30 USD ($20 if you already have the STEAM version of the original)? If you're the sort of Doomer who needs to own every Doom thing ever made, then it's probably worth your while. If you're a gamer on a budget, then I'd suggest waiting for it to hit the bargain shelf in a few months.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Development and Testing

Until now I've kept revisions of my infamous Doom Upgrade mod to myself until I've felt they were worthy of an official release but today the fancy struck me to try something different this time. I'm still working on what tentatively will be called the second edition of the mod and, while I don't feel that I've accomplished everything that I want to do before calling it a final release, the current version is very much playable and I have already made enough changes to it that in many ways it is quite different from previous versions. Thus I'm going to post a link to the current version of the mod here and, if you few readers of the blog feel inclined to do so, you can download it, do some beta testing of your own and give me feedback here. This time instead of suddenly getting a new version thrown at you from out of the blue you can let me know what you think of the development thus far and even make suggestions as to what you'd like to see in the mod in the future. So, without any lengthy descriptions of what you'll be getting yourselves into, here's the link:


This is a direct link to my DropBox file, which gets updated whenever I feel I've done enough editing worthy of saving. It's a work in progress, but at this point I think the only new additions will be monsters, brightmaps and such so the file found here should always be totally playable. Enjoy (I hope)!

EDIT:

Oh, I forgot...

For any newcomers, this mod requires either ZDoom or (preferably) GZDoom and of course a licensed Doom IWAD. I also recommend a launcher and a custom music WAD.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

More Reviews

For those of you interested in such things, DoomWorld's Newstuff Chronicles #417 is out. I mention this here for a number of reasons: this edition of Newstuff contains two reviews written by me, contains one review of a wad uploaded by me and, for the morbidly curious, contains a couple of reviews of wads uploaded by our friend DoomGuy2000! Thus I thought regular readers of my little blog here might be interested in taking a look...

Monday, October 1, 2012

Much Obliged

Fans of random map generators for classic id/Raven Software games rejoice! Just released is OBLIGE version 4.28! With just a few clicks, this thing can create entire megawads of randomly-generated and ready-to-play maps for Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake and more and even supports several popular sourceports! Check it out, and tell 'em Herc sent ya! Thanks, Andrew!