Gamespy's Doom Stuff

This aint gonna end well:
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/december03/doom/doom2shots/70.gif


I assume by the ouch face you mean the one that looks surprised? I get that if I am taking damage from something and whatever I am taking damage from is suddenly removed, such as grabbing a suit when melting on lava/etc, or something happening when being crushed-- perhaps iddqd?

I didnt knew there was a plasma gun in Episode 1 : http://www.gamespy.com/articles/december03/doom/doom1shots/26s.gif



Oopsie?




Oh yeah, props to all logged in lurkers :p

Ben said:

Hah, you can never, ever please the "hardcore" Internet fans. I've seen it so much that it just makes me smile now. :)

I'm surprised some of you guys would rather have crappy 320x200 shots. Sure, it's authentic, but who cares? For the purposes of this feature it's better to actually be able to see some detail instead of having to squint to make out a far-off texture.

Anyway, I hope you guys are deriving some tiny bit of enjoyment from our week-long series.

Do you plan on sticking around here and posting every now and then?

I did enjoy reading your review, even though you failed to adequately compare Doom and Doom 2 before you stated that you thought Doom 2 was better overall. :P I would have really agreed with something such as: "Whereas Doom's maps, especially those in episodes one and two, were excellent, they could have benefitted greatly from the wider range of monsters available in Doom 2."

Stick around? I've been visiting Doomworld, off and on, since it launched. Habitual lurker.

Ben said:

Stick around? I've been visiting Doomworld, off and on, since it launched. Habitual lurker.

Oh. You bastard! You can speak perfectly good English and you aren't posting? What the hell kind of example is that? DO U RILLY WANAN C DIS KINED OF TYPANG ON TEH INTRAWEB ARE OF TEH TYME? You must perform your civic duty for the land of Internettopianadia!

Anyway... no thoughts on my criticism of your review? :P

What's wrong with lurking, anyway? It seems pointless when it's so easy to join, but why is it a problem?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY "DOOM"!!!!!!

Ultraviolet said:

Anyway... no thoughts on my criticism of your review? :P

Nope. Far, far too busy writing tomorrow's articles. Sorry.

Even so, I don't usually see the point of arguing about such things in random forums. I got that out of my system a few years ago, so I'm a lot more relaxed now. ^_^/

Ben said:

Nope. Far, far too busy writing tomorrow's articles. Sorry.

Even so, I don't usually see the point of arguing about such things in random forums. I got that out of my system a few years ago, so I'm a lot more relaxed now. ^_^/

I don't mean an argument, per se, I was just wondering what you thought of what I thought of your opinion! :-D I mean, did you really find Doom 2's maps to be all that great?

I didn't mind Doom II. I thought it had some good maps.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY "DOOM"!!!!!!!

Ultraviolet said:

I don't mean an argument, per se, I was just wondering what you thought of what I thought of your opinion! :-D I mean, did you really find Doom 2's maps to be all that great?

Sure, else I wouldn't have said it. There are some I don't like, of course -- map14 comes to mind -- but overall I'd much rather play through Doom II's maps than Doom's.

DooM 2 exists as a mod tool.

Scuba Steve said:

DooM 2 exists as a mod tool.

Yeah, it's worthless to me by itself.

In the interests of balance, I feel I ought to indicate that I consider Doom 2 to be clearly superior to Doom 1.

I just felt that Doom's architectural and musical immersive aspects were superior. Of course, the expanded range of monsters in Doom 2 kicked ass left and right...

Ben: I was wondering if you're aware of the full range of features ZDoom supports. Were you aware that you can spawn Heretic, Hexen, and a (currently) limited range of Strife stuff (including weapons!) into Doom games in ZDoom? Or uh... do you hang out at the forums at zdoom.org? I thought just incase you weren't aware of that, you might have liked to know that people making ZDoom mods have been doing this with scripting for a while, but most people never hear of the mods that use these features.

Anyhoo, in case you were wondering about the sudden attention toward you and what you think about Doom, it's because I'm very glad to see mainstream coverage of Doom's 10th birthday. (I probably speak for at least a few other people here.) Is this because you have some sway with Gamespy and decided to do it, or because Gamespy decided it needed to be done to hype Doom 3, or a hybrid in which Gamespy decided to hype up Doom 3 by going for the whole nostalgia thing, and you, being genuinely interested in classic doom, were just the right guy for the job?

I thought I should clarify as well that you have done well in your articles, and I don't mean to hassle you about the fact that Doom is obviously better than Doom 2 (prepare for emoticon usage indicative of jest -- :P).

Grazza said:

In the interests of balance, I feel I ought to indicate that I consider Doom 2 to be clearly superior to Doom 1.

How come?

To me, Doom2 is good for editing because of the new monsters (and stuff like BFALL, but I wish it didn't get rid of SLADRIP). The Doom2 maps are all a lot smaller than the originals were, and they just aren't as detailed.

Also, the balance was really off. In Doom you juggled between shotgun and chaingun, with plasma and rocket in a few maps, in tough places. In Doom2 you can play the whole game with the SSG (which you get in the second level?!).

I've never thought Doom2 was much fun. I can play all four episodes without a break but if I play Doom2, I stop about halfway through, if not sooner. Some of the maps, like Downtown, I STILL can't remember how to finish.

Grazza said:

In the interests of balance, I feel I ought to indicate that I consider Doom 2 to be clearly superior to Doom 1.

I agree, I think, while Doom2 has some weak maps, on the whole they're all larger and more complex with better design than Ultimate Doom on the whole, plus there're more monsters and the ssg.

On the DOOM Memories section Ben said:
I only ever released two maps, a single player opus and a little deathmatch one. The DM map was an all-nighter -- I started it at 6PM and put the final touches on it at 6AM. Then I went to bed. When they tried to wake me up, my parents were strangely angry to find out I'd stayed up all night. Though I can see lots of flaws in it now, the single player map was decent for a maiden effort (I took lots of pride in having near-perfect texture alignment), and got me invited into a mod group creating some bizarre Independence Day/ID4 TC.

BEN: I've got a little problem with your source port section, heh. You said that Legacy supports skins in a way that implies that ZDoom doesn't, when, in fact, I'd say that ZDoom has even better skin support because in ZDoom, you can replace any sprite, including that of the player, with a sprite containing 16 (rather than 8) angles, given some additional sprite-naming syntax. ZDoom's player skins are implemented in a way that is compatible with Legacy's skins, too. I believe Legacy had them first, but ZDoom had them better. :P

You may also wish to mention that ZDoom supports Heretic, Hexen, all of the official commercial Doom games, and is working to support Strife (by emulation, because the source code is not available).

Aside from that, great job! Talking about the source ports is definitely the best way to combat "OMG DOOM SUXXS ITS SO OLD" people. I'd imagine you have your share of those on Gamespy...

I was not aware of ZDoom's skin features. I'll amend that later.

Is this because you have some sway with Gamespy and decided to do it, or because Gamespy decided it needed to be done to hype Doom 3, or a hybrid in which Gamespy decided to hype up Doom 3 by going for the whole nostalgia thing, and you, being genuinely interested in classic doom, were just the right guy for the job?

We were looking for special features to plug in gaps in our schedule, and I mentioned this anniversary was coming up. I'm normally a console editor, but I have fairly hardcore PC knowledge in a few areas, mostly classic FPS and RPG related. So, I took the helm of it.

We like to do week-long features like this, as they're good for traffic, interesting, educational for newbies, and readers seem to dig them. I like gaming sites to go beyond the standard review/preview/screenshot grind, and stuff like this is a good way to do that.

myk: Heh, the text files in those maps are incredibly embarassing. Thanks. >:p

Ben's title says:
Keep an eye on the Game Spy

Damn, I'm proud of this one. Now, if only it could fit onto a single line :/

Lay off Ben, he's an old ID4DOOM hand! Me and him go way back. If by "way back" you mean "he was part of the ID4DOOM team for a little while and I don't remember talking to him much".

Yeah, I made at least 30 sectors for one of the maps.

... maybe 25.

I liked the recent ports article, but I could have done without fragmaster's retarded and unfunny comments in the 'doom clones' article.

keep in mind you're never gonna please these freaks because:

a) you work for gamespy
b) you're not obsessed with every single aspect of doom like they are ;)

still all in all I have to say good job

excellent use of the idgames db btw

Julian: Try it as

Keep an eye
on the Game Spy

It just looks like a good place to break the line to me.

Cyb: He may have linked to /idgames, but he TOTALLY lost his cool points when he pointed us to Fileplanet. :P

I sure love Doom2

Lay off Fragmaster, he's an old Planetquake hand! Me and him go way back. If by "way back" you mean "I wrote some articles for the New Vore Times and talk to him on ICQ occasionally".

fileplanet is no worse than any other subscription queued file download site thingy

Cyb said:

fileplanet is no worse than any other subscription queued file download site thingy

I'm not trying to have an actual argument about this. I was just taking a quick jab. Laugh, would you? :P

Besides, the the shareware version he linked to is on the archive and several mirrors that could probably together satisfy the needs of as many people as actually have tried to DL that particular file from Fileplanet. (However, somebody somewhere might have statistics that say otherwise.)

Ultraviolet said:

BEN: I've got a little problem with your source port section, heh. You said that Legacy supports skins in a way that implies that ZDoom doesn't, when, in fact, I'd say that ZDoom has even better skin support because in ZDoom, you can replace any sprite, including that of the player, with a sprite containing 16 (rather than 8) angles, given some additional sprite-naming syntax. ZDoom's player skins are implemented in a way that is compatible with Legacy's skins, too. I believe Legacy had them first, but ZDoom had them better. :P

Not only that, but...

1) When Legacy first added skins, ZDoom added support for those skins, so Legacy skins work in ZDoom.
2) ZDoom can load an infinite number of skins. Legacy, last I checked, can only load about 10 at a time.
3) ZDoom skins can have 16 angles and can be scaled, allowing high-res skins.

Don't count out Vavoom on Strife support. A new release was planned for the end of this year and it's very far long with Strife support. Just check out its forums.