Your opinion on Doom 64?

I think the Nintendo 64 was well capable of having all the monsters, it was really just the low memory cartridge size they picked which caused the constraints.

Pros: All new graphics and maps. Enhanced engine allows for more complex level design and scripted transformations that add a lot of dimension to the experience. The enhanced sound effects, dark ambient music and strong use of dramatic lighting further immerse the player. Its overall aesthetic is much more gothic, grim and visceral than the original. New additions such as the Unmaker and the pentagram keys add to the replay value.

Cons: The new art style isn't as professional as the original, so some elements look great, while others are lackluster. Height variation is toned down compared to the PC versions. RAM limitations crop up everywhere, particularly in regards to texture size and the exclusion of several enemies. Overall look is too dark on older monitors. Complete absence of multiplayer.

Despite numerous cons, Doom 64 is an excellent and unique entry in the franchise. It really tried to do something unique within the Doom universe while retaining its core gameplay. There's a morbid, disturbing quality to it that is unforgettable, and many of the maps are on par with the best maps of Doom and Doom 2.

GoatLord said:

Pros: All new graphics and maps. Enhanced engine allows for more complex level design and scripted transformations that add a lot of dimension to the experience. The enhanced sound effects, dark ambient music and strong use of dramatic lighting further immerse the player. Its overall aesthetic is much more gothic, grim and visceral than the original. New additions such as the Unmaker and the pentagram keys add to the replay value.

Cons: The new art style isn't as professional as the original, so some elements look great, while others are lackluster. Height variation is toned down compared to the PC versions. RAM limitations crop up everywhere, particularly in regards to texture size and the exclusion of several enemies. Overall look is too dark on older monitors. Complete absence of multiplayer.

Despite numerous cons, Doom 64 is an excellent and unique entry in the franchise. It really tried to do something unique within the Doom universe while retaining its core gameplay. There's a morbid, disturbing quality to it that is unforgettable, and many of the maps are on par with the best maps of Doom and Doom 2.

The lack of multiplayer was the biggest flaw for me IMO. I always wanted to play this game with a friend via coop. The increased difficulty didn't help.

The n64 was so great with multiplayer, too. They really missed a chance to make this thing very competitive with Goldeneye, which had fun but sorta awkward deathmatch. It would have worked much better in Doom64.

The intro really leads you to believe the game will have cooperative, so when you get in there and see none whatsoever, it's pretty disappointing - especially considering the older titles had full multiplayter support, even if it was across two PC's. (To anyone who says splitscreen would have eaten too much ram, I point you to the wave upon wave of full 3D n64 games that feature it.)

Still an awesome game even considering its cons. Does Doom64 EX have any sort of multiplayer functionality?

Doomkid said:

The n64 was so great with multiplayer, too. They really missed a chance to make this thing very competitive with Goldeneye, which had fun but sorta awkward deathmatch. It would have worked much better in Doom64.

The intro really leads you to believe the game will have cooperative, so when you get in there and see none whatsoever, it's pretty disappointing - especially considering the older titles had full multiplayter support, even if it was across two PC's. (To anyone who says splitscreen would have eaten too much ram, I point you to the wave upon wave of full 3D n64 games that feature it.)

Still an awesome game even considering its cons. Does Doom64 EX have any sort of multiplayer functionality?

Check the page for it, I'm pretty sure it has a list of features that were added. I'm too lazy to look, but IIRC it does.

Doomkid said:

Wait a tic, you're telling me the shotgun could animate fully on the SNES, but it couldn't on the N64? I have serious doubts of that, I'm positive it was so the game felt like Quake, and nothing more, other than perhaps a drop of laziness.

It's hard to judge when the platforms and the games are so different.

Intentionally imitate Quake's animation problems seems pretty stupid to me. Does anyone actually think that it was an artistic decision to make the shotguns in Quake so simple?

Da Werecat said:

It's hard to judge when the platforms and the games are so different.

Intentionally imitate Quake's animation problems seems pretty stupid to me. Does anyone actually think that it was an artistic decision to make the shotguns in Quake so simple?

Looking at Hexen 64, they most definitely could have animated the shotgun and SSG. If it wasn't an intentional nod to Quakes "less intrusive" (and also less cool) animation, then it seems to have just been down to laziness, but I don't think so - I think it was the Quake factor. From what I've heard, some people actually prefer the more basic reload. I'm not one of those people..

Not that any of this matters or anything.

The lack of PC style reloads isn't a matter of ROM size limitations. It's a matter of two things: N64 texture size, and VRAM limitations.

When that glorious PC animation you're all picturing in your heads happens, during a few frames it literally looks like this:

|------------|
| \          | <- HOLY SHIT LOOK AT ALL THAT SPACE!!!!111
|  \         |
|   \        |
|    \O      |
|     \O     |
|      \OO   |
|       \OOO |
|------------|

N64 textures have to be square in memory. There's not really much you can do about all that wasted space. They're also limited to 65536 bytes - be that 64x64, 32x128, or 128x32. So the texture would be horribly stretched and there would be a noticeable quality difference between the firing animation and the flashy reload you're wanting so badly. It was the right choice given the hardware limitations being worked with.

My opinion?

*plays first 2 levels*

No archviles. 10/5 from.me!!

Seriously, I find it to be like any other doom game (minus cameras.)

Quasar said:

The lack of PC style reloads isn't a matter of ROM size limitations. It's a matter of two things: N64 texture size, and VRAM limitations.

When that glorious PC animation you're all picturing in your heads happens, during a few frames it literally looks like this:

|------------|
| \          | <- HOLY SHIT LOOK AT ALL THAT SPACE!!!!111
|  \         |
|   \        |
|    \O      |
|     \O     |
|      \OO   |
|       \OOO |
|------------|

N64 textures have to be square in memory. There's not really much you can do about all that wasted space. They're also limited to 65536 bytes - be that 64x64, 32x128, or 128x32. So the texture would be horribly stretched and there would be a noticeable quality difference between the firing animation and the flashy reload you're wanting so badly. It was the right choice given the hardware limitations being worked with.

So, if I understand correctly - simply adding more blank space around the shotgun to prevent any yucky-lookin' strecting and get it to it's square-tile requirement would have eaten up too much VRAM?

How did they overcome this issue in Hexen? Granted, the weapons aren't quite as large on-screen as the SSG, but theoretically, shouldn't the game slow to a crawl as you swing that huge fist?

Doomkid said:

How did they overcome this issue in Hexen? Granted, the weapons aren't quite as large on-screen as the SSG, but theoretically, shouldn't the game slow to a crawl as you swing that huge fist?

Well for one thing each player class in Hexen only has 4 weapons, versus the *ten* that are in Doom 64.

There's also a possible solution to the problem that would involve breaking down the sprites into tiles, so that portions of them are stored as separate textures that minimize coverage of the areas that aren't filled with pixels.

Doom 64's team did not judge the complex code needed to implement texture tiling of weapons to be worth the trade off for a couple of extra animations, I suppose, as it does not implement such. Maybe Hexen does, nobody knows as it's never been reverse engineered. It's worth stating that the performance of N64 Hexen is *bad* by comparison to Doom 64, though. Framerate is much more inconsistent, and pretty much consistently lower.

Seems like the D64 guys knew what they were doing - I'll take a basic animation over frame loss any day.

I wonder what was the major factor in them deciding to leave out multiplayer support?

I remember reading that Midway didn't think it would work well, particularly in regard to the ability to see the other player. This was less than a year after N64's launch, so if that statement is true, then Midway severely underestimated how players would react to splitscreen, as there were probably few, if any, examples of it in action, at least as far as FPSs go.

I suspect the missing enemies and animation would have made it if the team hadn't insisted on higher resolution sprites.

I remember when I was kid of thinking that Doom 64's monsters were scary almost as Quake's monsters

Considering the N64 couldn't do console-link multiplayer like the PSX could, I can't imagine what kind of maps you'd be restricted to playing with the game trying to run more than one instance of the renderer at a time, which is what you gotta do to support split screen. The framerate would be dismal at best, and that's probably what kept them from going ahead with it.

Doomkid said:

Seems like the D64 guys knew what they were doing - I'll take a basic animation over frame loss any day.

I agree. All in all I'd take the missing monsters over the lower resolution too. It would've been cool to have them, but the game worked well without them. Doom 1 didn't have arch-viles either, and it did just fine thanks.

Absolutely love it, like others have said this feels like the REAL Doom 3 and has unbelievable atmosphere, not to mention the incredible soundtrack (Dark Citadel and Breakdown are classics)
I also really enjoyed the way some maps literally transformed in front of your eyes and kept you on your edge, if only there were more maps :(.

Quasar said:

Considering the N64 couldn't do console-link multiplayer like the PSX could, I can't imagine what kind of maps you'd be restricted to playing with the game trying to run more than one instance of the renderer at a time, which is what you gotta do to support split screen. The framerate would be dismal at best, and that's probably what kept them from going ahead with it.

With such a small amount of geometry, the only thing that would have been taxing would be all the sprites on at once. I don't see that slowing gameplay down enough to be particularly bad, I bet it could easily run at half the normal framerate or better with splitscreen.

Quasar said:

Considering the N64 couldn't do console-link multiplayer like the PSX could, I can't imagine what kind of maps you'd be restricted to playing with the game trying to run more than one instance of the renderer at a time, which is what you gotta do to support split screen. The framerate would be dismal at best, and that's probably what kept them from going ahead with it.

I heard that HeXen 64 runs well in 4-split, though. The framerate is slower, but I think the bigger issue was that none of the character sprites have rotation when in a splitscreen mode.

Quasar said:

Considering the N64 couldn't do console-link multiplayer like the PSX could, I can't imagine what kind of maps you'd be restricted to playing with the game trying to run more than one instance of the renderer at a time, which is what you gotta do to support split screen. The framerate would be dismal at best, and that's probably what kept them from going ahead with it.

How did they manage to get goldeneye to run fairly smoothly while in 2 player splitscreen? With 4 players, it got laggy as hell, but with two the frame loss isn't too bad.

pitfalls was a fantastic level that really showed what the lighting could do, that central area with the glowing pillars and broken bridge looked awesome.

Duke Nukem 64 had multiplayer.

Doomkid said:

How did they manage to get goldeneye to run fairly smoothly while in 2 player splitscreen? With 4 players, it got laggy as hell, but with two the frame loss isn't too bad.

Didn't Perfect Dark fix those lag problems with 3 to 4 players in multiplayer?

Avoozl said:

Duke Nukem 64 had multiplayer.



Didn't Perfect Dark fix those lag problems with 3 to 4 players in multiplayer?

I found that the whole game had more lag than Goldeneye, well at least on Hi-Res mode.

I'm pretty sure 3D models take up less space on-cart than sprites. Since you'd only have to load the one model + texture & animations instead of several large textures (especially since the N64 has a pretty bad texture buffer bottleneck).

The only problem is that 3D models would take up more resources at the time of use, with all those monsters crawlin' around.

I've done some rudimentary calculations, and if each character was composed of say, 200-500 polygons (somewhere between Quake and Quake 2's counts, I think), you could easily have a dozen or more characters in one area, provided the geometry of the environment was only moderately more detailed than a typical Doom map. It would likely have required the RAM expansion to run at optimal speed. I've always wanted to see Doom 64 as a fully 3D game, even if it meant blocky models.

Quasar said:

I think it is a superb masterpiece in every possible way. The only thing that would make it better is MORE of it. They shoulda done the sequel >_<

I agree. I finished it a few nights ago and when you take out the secret maps, there's only 25 levels. I wish there was more tech base maps, since those are my favorite.

One thing that I also didn't like was the fact that Bullets, Shells, and Rockets are very common throughout the whole game, by Cells are very rare. Some maps didn't even have any cells whatsoever, even late in the game. I'm guessing they did this to prevent people from overusing the BFG or Upgraded Unmaker.

It seems like quite the fun game.

I need to try it out sometime.

Drilbur said:

I agree. I finished it a few nights ago and when you take out the secret maps, there's only 25 levels. I wish there was more tech base maps, since those are my favorite.

One thing that I also didn't like was the fact that Bullets, Shells, and Rockets are very common throughout the whole game, by Cells are very rare. Some maps didn't even have any cells whatsoever, even late in the game. I'm guessing they did this to prevent people from overusing the BFG or Upgraded Unmaker.

Yeah. It's best to reserve the Unmaker for two things - Pain elementals/lost souls and weakening the occasional Baron of Hell. Other than that, you should rely on the SSG mostly. BFG is also OK for coming around corners to take out Barons, but cells are so tight on Watch Me Die that this tactic probably isn't wise there after about level 22 or so. You really gotta save up some cells for the end. I don't think it's that big a deal, but they definitely could have added a couple more cell packs at the start of The Absolution at least, if not in some of the earlier levels, so it wouldn't be such a pinch. But, I can understand it. It makes the game very intimidating and a worthy challenge even for PC Doomers who have been spoiled with slaughter maps.

I've only played through the Abolustion TC, which I loved. (One of these days I'll get around to Doom64EX.) It "feels" different enough that it's almost like a new game, but it's still recognizably DOOM. Good stuff. I did find the new monster sprites to be more creepier than the originals, but maybe that's just because I'm not so accustomed to them?

GoatLord said:

With such a small amount of geometry, the only thing that would have been taxing would be all the sprites on at once. I don't see that slowing gameplay down enough to be particularly bad, I bet it could easily run at half the normal framerate or better with splitscreen.

Thing about D64, it's never really 3D. All those bits where you go over/under are just clever scripting combined with moving floors/texture swapping. So unless they built the entire game 'round Coop from the start and implemented actual GZDoom-esq 3D floors, all you'd probably have gotten would be deathmatch-exclusive maps.

Better than nothing, I suppose.