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Avoozl

Your favorite Doom-clone for its texture and sprite art?

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Mine would have to be Shadow Warrior, I just love it's art style and Asian theme.

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As much as I adore Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior for their realism, the best Doom clone for me is Heretic for the forboding and depressing atmosphere. Those wizard dudes are awesome and the medieval textures just as awesome.

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I think a lot of games from that era suffered from insane colour palette choices; doom is probably a good example, actually. A quarter of the palette is taken up by the worst shade of pink imaginable. The primary colours are all fucking useless, too bright and don't scale correctly. Duke Nukem's pallette has the opposite problem; everything is a little staid and grey looking, and combined with the cardboard engine that duke uses, the world you inhabit ends up looking less than solid.

Heretic gets it about right. Quake goes too far in the opposite direction.

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I prefer Heretic's art direction to Hexen's. It's mostly the same, but with the muddiness blurriness dialed way down. Heretic is just cleaner, with better color contrast. My memories of vanilla Hexen back in the nineties was a confusing soup of brown pixels. Way too busy, way too indistinct.

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what, Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior are "Doom Clones"? Actually, since they're using a different engine (Build) and even when i was a ignorant kid, i know that are slightly different games from Doom...

Anyway, the best artistic doom clone is strife imo

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walter confalonieri said:

what, Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior are "Doom Clones"? Actually, since they're using a different engine (Build) and even when i was a ignorant kid, i know that are slightly different games from Doom...

Well I thought 2.5D sprite based FPS games were considered Doom clones because they're essentially going for the same thing different engines aside.

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jmickle66666666 said:

you literally just described heretic's atmosphere as depressing


The music also has a lot to do with it.

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Avoozl said:

Well I thought 2.5D sprite based FPS games were considered Doom clones because they're essentially going for the same thing different engines aside.


Ah, all right, thanks for clarification...

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I've always been partial to Dark Forces for a fairly wide color palette it had, although I think different levels had different palettes that changed the color of sprites and textures ever so slightly (Like everything was tinted Red on Gromas). The mix of hand drawn graphics mixed with poorly rendered graphics was a bit jarring though (The Dark Troopers look very weird compared to everything else as does the plasma gun). The Kell Dragon was very out of place in the way it was styled, as an example.

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I'm not sure if that'd be Heretic or Hexen. One of those two anyway.

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I'd call Shadow Warrior a Duke Clone.... but since its by the same devs, its a cousin or a brother.

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for its texture and sprite art

Wrack.


P.S.: Carnevil as the author of Wrack has disagreed about Wrack being a Doom clone, and spent a lot of effort (articles, video commentaries) to provide proofs. I agree with him. Still, a lot of principles and mechanics in Wrack are undoubtly borrowed from / inspired by Doom, so I think it counts.

I find it such a shame that with its added complexity in features and detail, Wrack lags on my computer to the point of being unplayable.

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darknation said:

I think a lot of games from that era suffered from insane colour palette choices; doom is probably a good example, actually. A quarter of the palette is taken up by the worst shade of pink imaginable. The primary colours are all fucking useless, too bright and don't scale correctly. Duke Nukem's pallette has the opposite problem; everything is a little staid and grey looking, and combined with the cardboard engine that duke uses, the world you inhabit ends up looking less than solid.

Heretic gets it about right. Quake goes too far in the opposite direction.


IIRC Quake's colours were chosen as so dull partly for technical reasons. Something to do with the way the software renderer worked. I can't find a source right now, I think it was in Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.

That doesn't mean they aren't sill pretty bland at times though.

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Their new lighting system would probably look worse with more saturated colors. Both for technical and artistic reasons.

Heretic is very neat, although I never thought about it as gloomy.

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In terms of atmosphere, I like Blood. The environments, the enemies, the over-the-top weapons, they're all great. In terms of gameplay, though, Dark Forces is my favorite. Seems like it should fail on every level - a Doom knock-off, a licensed game, but it really is a blast, and it was one of the first FPS games I ever played that actually tried to give a semblance of structure to the levels - to try to make them look like real places, and not just very pretty mazes.

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My fave is definitely Hexen1 because of the Chaos Serpent, the Dark Bishop, the Heresiarch, the puffy mushrooms, and all of the foresty tree sprites, and the castle-themed textures.

P.S.: Shadow Warrior is not a DOOM-clone. That's a Duke3D clone!

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Shadow Warrior probably has what I would consider the prettiest colour palette of the 2.5D games, with Hexen having the best over all art design.

I really like blood as a game, but I don't know why people are praising that sickly brown/gray thing it's got going :/

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scifista42 said:

Wrack.


P.S.: Carnevil as the author of Wrack has disagreed about Wrack being a Doom clone, and spent a lot of effort (articles, video commentaries) to provide proofs. I agree with him. Still, a lot of principles and mechanics in Wrack are undoubtly borrowed from / inspired by Doom, so I think it counts.

I find it such a shame that with its added complexity in features and detail, Wrack lags on my computer to the point of being unplayable.


I keep feeling like its Doom when I play it, even if its a near 20 year difference. It felt so much like Doom that I thought it used a modified Doom engine, but someone corrected me. I never got a Quake Vibe playing Half Life 1. I never got a Doom feeling vibe playing Hard Reset.

Maybe you need a better video card to play Wrack?

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Heretic and Hexen. I like the spirit of those games maybe more than Doom's. The Raven Software guys were good at creating dark and decayed fantasy worlds.

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