Gatling

Vordakk said:

2012 GAMING SUBCATEGORY DEFINITIONS

Casual game: An indie game, usually 2-dimensional, which requires a reasonable amount of intelligence and puzzle-solving ability to play. This type of game can be played for a little while and then put down, so the player can engage in activities outside the sphere of gaming(i.e. a life). The game may also lead to an increase in mental acuity due to it's method of causing the player to use his brain in order to advance the plot or storyline.

Hardcore game: A game crafted by a major developer(possessing tons of cash to throw at marketing of said game), usually 3-dimensional, which requires only the most basic cognitive ability and amounts to little more than a barely-interactive CG movie. The game will feature a design that encourages marathon playing, and/or grinding, so that the player is continually enticed to keep going so that he may obtain another seratonin reuptake. The perfect hardcore gamer eventually commits suicide by ignoring his instincts to sleep, eat, and use the restroom.

Bump.

Seriously well spoken.

pcorf said:

Endgame.wad but that was released before the first Cacowards in 2004. One of the best and most underrated wads of all time.

Interesting. The other posts here seem to imply that their suggested wads are good but not great. How would you rate Endgame.wad overall? 20th best wad of all time?

schwerpunk said:

The Unreal series

The last unreal game, unreal II from 2003, was not only not doom-like, it was un-unreal-like

...assuming we're talking about single-player gaming in this thread.

Hasn't any official attempt to revamp Doom 3 already been superseded by mods? Does id software really have anything to offer better than Sikkmod and Doom 3 Perfected/Evolution?

savagegrant said:

Yeah, maybe we could have a Cacowards ceremony for the previous Cacoward winners to narrow the list down. Like a Cacowards Hall of Fame. lol. That or we can put all these WADs to the vote right here? heh

yes please. I'll come back in a couple years to see if doomworld will compile a Cacowards Hall of Fame for the 20th anniversity of Doom. There will have been over 200 wads selected for Cacowards by that time!

Phobus said:

Somebody should sticky the first post in this thread as the definitive response to "What are the best Doom wads?" - a question we get every other week, it seems. A true win would be if it had links to /idgames archive downloads and said what port and IWAD it was for though ;)

That's way too many wads for anyone who's looking for 'the best Doom wads'. That's a list of wads you would recommend to somebody who has played over a dozen megawads, but that person would most likely be familiar with the cacowards.

How about the OP compares these new games directly to games from 10 years ago, say 1999-2001? That era's equivalent of, for example, Rage, would be Kingpin: Life of Crime.

Memfis said:

"2" reminds me of map01 from The Puzzler.

Cool stuff. I just tried it out. The first puzzle is a room with at least 18 switches, and I only managed to figure out the effect of 3 of them! The second puzzle is a bunch of blue and red rectangles, each of which teleports to another rectangle depending on which side you try to exit the teleport. I see no pattern at all, so I just can't confirm that these are good puzzles.

Jodwin said:

This is pretty much false. There's nothing at all in either PK or SS that makes them more suitable for large arenas. It's simply a direction that the games' developers decided to take with their level design. From a game mechanic perspective, Doom is actually far more suitable for large arenas thanks to player movement speed and infighting (which adds more variety into huge, drawn out battles).

It’s not so much that PK&SS play particularly well in large arenas, it’s more that Doom plays poorly in large arenas (I use ‘arena’ interchangeably with ‘horrendous map design’ from earlier.) Given enough room, a player of intermediate skill can simply circle strafe, clumping enemies into packs so that no bullet is wasted and area of effect damage is maximized.

Jodwin said:

There are no level design challenges in either of those games that differ from what challenges Doom may have (barring the obvious differences in technology). If you were to make a custom level in Serious Sam there would be no reason why you couldn't make a normal level in it, and as we well know there are far more insane levels made for Doom than there are for Serious Sam.

Can you imagine entering a large long room in Doom with enemies starting to charge from the other side of the room? Maps like this are not made for Doom but are common in Serious Sam because they are capable of providing a challenge in Serious Sam but not Doom. Small variations in monster numbers which are negligible in Doom can make or break the intensity/fairness of a fight in Serious Sam.

Jodwin said:

Same goes for Serious Sam. Doubly so for Pain Killer's hordes of slumbering and weak melee enemies.

There are deeper tactics everywhere. Kamikazes can be killed so that they blow up nearby kamikazes and you can stun kamikazes to position them so that large chains would explode. Boars are best killed with a chainsaw as they charge past you or when they’re turning around (usually at a wall) after having charged. AI may be simple but fast, varied swarms develop into difficult patterns way more chaotic than Doom’s. You find yourself changing weapons and targets on the fly (and killing enemies when they’re 2 seconds away from you), whereas in Doom you either use one just one weapon on a group of enemies, or change them in an order you have mentally prepared earlier like rocket-to-chaingun. And of course, the importance of good aim is understated in Doom.

Jodwin said:

They succeed simply because they're the only alternatives. If you look at the FPS games made these days, it's mostly CoD clones and rehashes of Serious Sam and Pain Killer.

While you can clump Half Life and Bioshock with Call of Duty, I’m a sucker for a third category of FPS games that feature slow unfolding combat like Delta Force, Farcry, Swat, which are on one end of the FPS spectrum with Doom in the other and CoD in the middle.

Wondering if there are any reputable mods that incorporate this. For example,

1. A level with very limited ammo and many switches that unleash monsters or lower floors into dangerous fluid. Learn to flip switches with the correct order and timing to trap monsters or provoke infighting.

2. Scour the many-roomed mansion of a wealthy eccentric. Switches open up passages behind bookcases for just enough time for you to run to the opening before you're shut in. Look for clues as to which secret corresponds to which switch. Discover evil experiments.

3. Kill every human twice to continue. Killing an arch-vile may lead to an unwinnable situation.

4. A certain number of lost souls are necessary to reach critical mass and cleanse the demon infestation. Survive in a closed room while allowing pain elementals to spawn lost souls.

5. Anything surprising.

Dragonsbrethren said:

Not all that many, actually. Mainly because most games I play only have "enhancement" mods or mods that add content inside the existing levels, meaning you have to play through a chunk of the game or cheat to play around with it. Those just don't interest me all that much, especially when the enhancement mods just make the game look or play worse than it does out of the box.

Hmm, many games have extensive and thoroughly tested "enhancement" mods. I see from your post that when you like a certain game, you look for more content for that game.

Gatling said:

How do you find your mods? Do you look for your favorite titles, or titles you just got, and find mods that look interesting on moddb.com or fileplanet.com?

Avoozl said:

There's also gamefront (formally filefront).

Cool, though I guess I was asking a more general question. I mean, is that the way you browse mods? Or do you find dedicated sites like doomworld.com and its links or nexusmods.com? Do you search mods for games you like, or games you find disappointing? Do you ever get games with an explicit determination to play mods on it? (Should I create a new thread, with a poll?) I'm curious about you people because mods are much harder to sort/navigate than commercial games.

For example, I got Quake 1 and 2 recently. It is so boring. Levels are so repetitive and monotone, it's like I'm clearing the same room/staircase over and over. Whatever intricacy a level has simply translates into me wandering for a while. The games aren't too hard but enemies seem to take forever to kill and the same methods work every time, this is especially true in Q2 which I see as a step down from Q1. Could mods turn the quakes inside-out? Well, I found the following channel featuring playthroughs of select Q1 mods and, at a glance, most mods seem to take cues from original Q1 level design. There are few apparent mods that take a different approach, like an Indian-themed mod that features open-arena-style combat atop a big castle. Should I abandon Q1,Q2 addons based on my dislike of the originals?

Well presented Q1 mod playthroughs:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Monster667

How do you find your mods? Do you look for your favorite titles, or titles you just got, and find mods that look interesting on moddb.com or fileplanet.com?

I’m guessing that most people on this forum have played lots of Doom WADs, so you’re obviously open-minded to user-made enhancements. Assuming Doom is not the only game you’ve ever played, I’m curious as to what games you play with WADs or their equivalent.

darkreaver said:

Well, I dunno. Yet another "list your favorites" thread?

All those other threads seem buried deep within the forums, and all of them seem written for experienced WAD players, not noobs. That's why I labelled this thread 'wtf'

Phml said:

I'd give Doom 2 levels a 3 out of 5 at most. In videogaming it's generally safe to assume the official product trumps most if not all mods made for it, but Doom is the one exception to this rule with a vast quantity of quality mods around.

I think you mean add-ons, not mods. Doom WADs are essentially add-ons, extra levels. I don't know much about those so I trust you. I suppose that Doom has the one engine that most modders can approach like professional developers.

But videogames very often receive mods that really make the game much much better. These are the mods that don't touch level design and art assets. Instead they improve the engine, squash bugs, tweak game balance, enhance replayability, and so on (the stuff Doom did right in the official product).

Pain Killer and Serious Sam (PK&SS) the two games you compare to Doom, are well suited to simple large arena-style mad design. These games are much harder to play on a shot-by-shot basis and foes are harder to keep track of. The main challenge of designing a map in PK&SS is regulating and fine-tuning how sentries and waves of chargers spawn, to deliver a satisfying challenge.

In Doom, on the other hand, monsters themselves are easy to deal with. The few monster types are instantly recognizable by the player, their AI is predictable, and some tactics are a sure-fire way to wipe everybody out. The primal rhythm of Doom is relaxed and consistent relative to PK&SS, and can be more smoothly maintained. The real enemy in Doom is architecture. Challenge starts to come from handling a horde of monsters in a confined environment, where things like dodging and provoking infighting can become impossible if you’re not careful. Pacing changes. For example, it’s easy to pump away at demons in a wide corridor with a dead end, but you may not maintain this before they corner and overwhelm you. Maps or their segments become sorts of puzzles, where the tide of battle slowly shifts. With Doom and unlike PK&SS, I feel that if you can beat a new level on your very first attempt, without saving/loading, then it’s too easy.

That’s why PK&SS seem to take a different approach and succeed despite having poor map design. Or did I get it all wrong?

Various lists review dozens to hundreds of Doom WADs. If all flavors of Doom are available, from nectarine pecan caramel to mushroom kangaroo roast, the noobie is likely to get overwhelmed and, with no chocolate or strawberry available, will probably stick to vanilla. This is where I am. I missed out on Doom when it was first released, and only just now (2012) I got and played through Doom II hell on earth. I thought it was pretty good, but not great. There are many other games I find more fun. Considering that the reviewers I’ve found give plenty of perfect scores to user-made WADs, I’m guessing they would give Doom II a 7 out of 5. Many WADs have been made quite late and to be honest, the only reason I see why people would make Dooms WADs when newer engines are available, would be to create games that have full production values and a professional look that is extremely difficult to achieve in newer engines. So I’m pretty much just interested in WADs that supersede the original Doom, or maybe offer something different while being a quality product and more than a joke. The closest that I’ve found to a modest recommendation is the handful of games recognized by Compet-N: Hell Revealed, Requiem, Memento Mori, Memento Mori 2, Classic Episode, Alien Vendetta.

Why oh why has nobody mentioned KISS: Psycho Circus?

Return to Castle Wolfenstein resembles Doom gameplay when you fight non-human monsters or the big end boss where circle-strafing is essential.

Resident Evil (4) in fast motion. Enemies are slow and take a whoop-ton of damage, and have lengthy pain animations, in about the same balanced ratios as Doom. I suspect that if somebody increased its game speed by a factor of two, gave it FPS-like controls, and doubled the amount of available ammo, it would play much like Doom on easy.

I think that most early shooters were influenced directly by Doom, so are similar in terms of gameplay. I’m thinking Duke Nukem, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Quake, SiN, and so many others copied many elements like insane running speed and complex level design.

I think the problem with Doom graphics has little to do with low-res textures. The big Doom issue is that its gameplay is essentially 2D. Height differences are sorts of fences. (BTW I really want to see a birds-eye-view-make of Doom, anyone care to help me out?) So people kinda feel like they’re playing Alien Shooter with blinders on. Because of this combat is clunky and feels simple, especially when you and the monsters are on different heights. Sprites are also awkward to shoot, especially around corners and when the monster is both behind a fence and higher than you.

Engine limitations can be extremely damaging. Big problems with early Grand Theft Auto games had to do with their engine, e.g. it’s very hard to estimate the height and slope of terrain, and you have a very limited field of vision. When you’re driving you can’t see two seconds ahead of you. You can shoot stuff offscreen. Sure you can role-play as Mr Magoo but even that gets old.