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Grain of Salt

What's your least favorite health pickup?

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That's an interesting question. Health bonuses kinda suck but at least can surpass the limits. So, any health item which has between 5-15 HP recover sucks. But, the same goes for some big health items which you can pick up by accident while having almost max. health. Say, you pick up a 40 HP recover item when you have 95 HP with a max. of 100 HP. Item wasted, basically.

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I don't know whether you count negative ones. If not, probably a bunch of health bonuses which makes the screen YELLOW!

 

If so, for example, some designers put rotten foods in Wolf3D mods. They have slightly off color and you take damage when you touch it. Haven't seen that in Doom, or I forgot. Similarly, there is Poison Mushroom on Super Mario Brother: Lost Levels (or SMB 2 in JP).

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10 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

Dog food in Wolfenstein 3D. Fucking ew, dude.

I'd rank being able to drink blood pools when low on health as more disgusting than dog food. It even uses the hitler death slupring sound when you do it.

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Just now, InsanityBringer said:

I'd rank being able to drink blood pools when low on health as more disgusting than dog food. It even uses the hitler death slupring sound when you do it.

Oh yeah, can't forget about this! Sometimes it's blood with bones, and BJ crunches them all!

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Probably berserk because of that highly annoying red tint that takes forever to wear off. Even when I really need some health I will think for a bit before picking it up.

 

Or maybe the megasphere. Finding mega outside of slaughtermaps is often a disappointment because getting 200\200 makes you feel really overpowered. It's like using it is almost unfair to the monsters since for quite a while survival becomes such a trivial matter, even if you take into account the fact that really high HP makes you less cautious. But pretending to ignore it would be silly too (although there are some maps where I do it, like gryyd.wad). Megasphere is also rather ugly compared to the stylish soulsphere.

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interesting idea for a topic. Mine would probably be the Berserk Pack, because it's always there when I need to use some weapons (example: MAP13 DOOM2) And the red tint annoys me. I also really don't see the reason to use them, unless you need to let out some steam and gib a shotgun guy

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I like all of them, even the health potion, I love the sound of the bonuses, it's one of the limited things that remind me to my childhood playing Doom. Probably my really least favourite not hated health pickup would be the stimpack. Unavoidable health packs are not my taste, and berserks that interfere with my weapons bother me. Other than that, go health pickups!  

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The soulsphere. You really want 200 health, but you're at 16% or something and there are no other medkits around. So you just have to deal with 116 health that will drain instantly.

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I like all kinds of health pick ups. My least favorite? Health Bonus. From other games, it's probably the Full restore from Pokemon.

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The PC version of the health bonus hardly amounts to anything unless there's a comical amount of them or they're commonly found in packs of more than 5 (D2's eight near the start is decent). PSX and D64 got it better by making it 2 points per potion, so even 5 would net 10 HP.

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7 hours ago, Jayextee said:

Dog food in Wolfenstein 3D. Fucking ew, dude.

 

You can actually drink the blood sprites if you are under 10%. Yum!

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Health bonus. As a mapper, I find them hard to use, and as a player, I find them hardly useful. A single one gives too little health, and a stack of them blinds the player by tinting the screen with the pickup flash color.

 

The next one would be berserk, because it forces a weapon change, but at least the time-critical situations in which this causes a big problem are rare.

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30 minutes ago, scifista42 said:

Health bonus. As a mapper, I find them hard to use, and as a player, I find them hardly useful. A single one gives too little health, and a stack of them blinds the player by tinting the screen with the pickup flash color.

 

The next one would be berserk, because it forces a weapon change, but at least the time-critical situations in which this causes a big problem are rare.

 

The bonuses are actually quite useful. They have the same function as the coins from the Mario games: they can be used as breadcrumbs that guide the player. They really should have been 2% instead of 1% though.

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The pork chops in the walls in castlevania. Like ew why would you eat some meat from a wall. God knows how long its been in there.

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stimpacks; they force me to do mental arithmetic to make sure i dont waste the 10hp they offer. even worse if they are combined with medikits and bonuses in the same room/location! :X

i much prefer ToD's approach (first mapper that comes to mind) of just putting a megasphere after or before each 'room' or encounter, so i can just pick back up to 200/200 and dont have to worry about 'wasting' HP.

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Square's health pickups used to not be on plates. So you'd be wandering around a sewer system eating bits of cake clean off the floor. This actually kind of bothered me so much that I added the plates in I think at some point before we released 1.0.

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21 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

Square's health pickups used to not be on plates. So you'd be wandering around a sewer system eating bits of cake clean off the floor. This actually kind of bothered me so much that I added the plates in I think at some point before we released 1.0.

 

On the other hand, Square should have diabetes by now from eating and drinking all those cakes and sodas.

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The sub-aquatic foodstuffs in Square being protected by glass covers is hilarious. He's not bringing the burgers to the surface, so presumably he's eating them faster than the water can rush in after he lifts the lid. That's crazy ravenous!

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Some thoughts on all the stuff. Not really too concerned about answering the title question. 

 

1% bonuses: Yeah these can be tough to use well, and in a few of my maps I haven't used them at all. It's hard for them to contribute to gameplay in a meaningful way unless you use enough of them, but then you also have to make sure they look decent, because spamming bonuses everywhere doesn't fit certain aesthetics. There are two general approaches to placing them: the transparent approach, where you encounter bonuses at very logical points in your direct path, and so you don't even notice how how often you are picking them up; and the scavenger approach, where bonuses are sort of like a mini-RPG trinket that can be used to reward exploration and cultivate a sense of mystery. Both can work. Bonuses combined with other health pickups that allow the player to top off to somewhere 100% HP can also be fun.
 

Stimpacks: I like these in maps that have noticeably low health to begin with, so that even a stimpack feels like minor salvation, or that have scads of health, so that you can just walk across a row without feeling like you have wasted much when the last one takes you from 98% to 100%. Having to whip out a mental calculator and do 'health math' (quite remarkable that I already had a photoshop for this) slows down the pace of play, which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on both the intended pace of the map in general and at that specific point, so setups that encourage it or remove it from the calculus altogether are a mapping 'tool' just like any other and should be used consciously.

 

Medkits: The 'default' health pickup, as it were. I've always spelled it medkit and if that makes me worse than Hitler, so be it. When I want to add a modest amount of health to a map, I default to this unless I have a particular reason not to -- two medkits, for instance, unless I decide on a whim that five stimpacks looks better.

Berserk pack: At the end of a map for continuous play. In secrets. In out-of-combat areas. At the start, offering a minor gambit between an immediate pickup and boosted punch strength or a delayed pickup for extra health. Those uses are among the ones that are sensible to me. The autoswitch to the first and the red glow are the downsides that others have mentioned, and that makes them somewhat unfit as heat-of-the-battle pickups. A shame because you could conceive of some fun scenarios that involve something like handing out two berserks for a fight, encouraging the player to balance the options of delaying the pickup as long as possible, risking sooner death, picking them up quicker, risking a later death or leaving the fight low on health. Some Joshymaps in SoD have starts that are much like this, where you should delay the pickup as much as possible. I like that. Overall, the most 'niche' pickup. 

Soulspheres: These look cool and can feel quite special in maps where they are rare. It's no wonder they were often a secret tease in the iwads. As quick infusions of a high but modest amount health that also can top the player up above 100%, these are invaluable in a wide variety of maps, from low-DPS, low-health maps to dangerous slaughtermaps, sort of at a Goldilocks point for true powerups: strong, but not too strong. They also have a double-ended sort of health math. Oddly it's not the high end -- risking picking up a soulsphere when you are somewhere above 100% -- that is the main concern. It's the low end. In many maps a soulsphere is the main way of getting above 100%, so picking it up at, say, 10% health, wastes 90% of that benefit. The soulsphere's convenience (over four spread-out medkits) and ability to take the player above 100% makes it a fun 'oh shit I'm gonna die' powerup in high-monster-DPS encounters. You can imagine the adrenaline of desperately rushing to it in the midst of getting wrecked, and it's enough to keep you afloat but not take you out of harm's way. So out of the heat of battle, complement with stimpacks and medkits if you want to be 'kind' (not necessarily right next to the soulsphere, though). But in battle, that isn't a big concern, because yeah I'd rather 'waste' the potential upper-end boost than die in battle, obviously. 

 

Megaspheres: I think of these as more of a max reset than a true 'health pickup'. Naturally, these are perfectly at home in maps with high monster DPS (there are maps that make megasphere spam feel natural! and those maps are also generally awesome). Outside of those maps -- which are usually slaughtermaps -- I'm not such a huge fan of them, because being topped-off removes a lot of the all-important feeling of danger. So the key to good usage is the map at that point being dangerous even at 200%/200%. Multi-megasphere encounters are easier to balance well than one might think, despite each megasphere representing a pretty big difference in available recovery. This is because the main threats in such encounters tend to be either reliable high-intensity attrition, where with some testing it's possible to gauge how many megaspheres you should need with a given strategy, or ultra-high lethality, where what you gauge instead is how many [cyber rockets, vile hits, etc.] are acceptable, and where even an excess of megapsheres sometimes doesn't remove the excitement, because it doesn't matter that there are four megaspheres sitting on the other side of the room if you get gangraped by a cluster of cybs before you are anywhere near it. 

 

 

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2 hours ago, yakfak said:

everything pales to the nali healing fruit

Now that was a gimmick if I ever saw one. One hell of an inventory item.

 

30 minutes ago, DooM_RO said:

On the other hand, Square should have diabetes by now from eating and drinking all those cakes and sodas.

His very shape says it all, really.

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