Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...

Maggle

Members
  • Content count

    300
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Maggle

  1. I agree with this only if you're referring to the Catacomb sequels starting with Abyss made by the same team that would later go on to form JAM productions and make Blake Stone. Those games have a variety in locations that Wolf 3d simply doesn't have, and gives you those spells a lot more often to help you deal with the increased monster count. These changes alone enhance the gameplay loop to being more fun than Wolf 3d at least in my opinion. The 3 three catacomb weapons are more distinct than the 4 wolf 3d weapons, as all the weapons in Wolf 3d are essentially straight upgrades to each other and pull from the same ammo supply Catacomb's spells both use a separate ammo supply and have distinct uses. Xterminators act like a powerful short-range shotgun as well as a radial panic button for when you're surrounded, Zappers are like a flamethrower useful for suppression, even the basic spell is good as just a few shots will take out most enemies, they can be fired as fast as the player can press the button and can even be fired while casting one of the spells, although after a few shots there's a brief cooldown. Every couple of maps you go to a new location that usually also has new enemy types, so it's far less visually uninteresting and monotonous. The original Catacomb 3D made by Id Software is grindy and pretty boring, it hasn't aged very well. I don't think that game has much over Wolf 3d aside from the aforementioned weapon variety.
  2. Maggle

    Will a non-Eternity Engine version of Heartlands exist?

    Stripped down from what? I don't know much about Eternity or how it works, but it's already considerably enhanced from vanilla, having unique scripting features and even some Decorate support (albeit limited). Do you mean stripped down from GZDoom? Because it's not a Zdoom port. It's its own thing. Like what? what's wrong with it? why is it such a dealbreaker? Since there's so many source ports for Doom, most people aren't going to have much reason to try every one of them. Most other retro shooters get like a couple at most, but Doom has so many obscure source ports that most people haven't even touched. I think it's cool that something like Heartland gives people a reason to try out an often overlooked Doom port. Not only would it be impractical to alter it so heavily that it can work in GZDoom, i feel like that would defeat the purpose. I'm inferring, but i think a large part of the reason Skillsaw even made Heartland was to get people to try Eternity.
  3. RoTT was developed for a heavily modified Wolf 3d Engine around the same time Doom was being developed, and was originally meant to be Wolfenstein's sequel. Their plans changed when ID told them they can't make it a Wolfenstein sequel because they didn't want it taking sales away from Doom. So it doesn't have the same cutting edge tech, but nothing really did at the time. It still did quite a bit for itself since its engine still allowed moving walls, floating platforms, and death traps, and the game itself introduced Rocket Jumping and CTF. RoTT's sounds were also much clearer and higher quality than most other games in the early 90s, it even had voice acting. The graphics were also quite good for the time, using photographed actors kinda like Mortal Kombat. And it's still not a very good comparison because RoTT really doesn't play much like Doom. You get a couple of infinite ammo bullet weapons like Dual Pistols and an SMG and the remaining weapon slot is for a variety of different rocket launchers or magic weapons that gib most human enemies in one or two hits. There's powerups that transform you, platforming challenges, and the whole game is very much focused on being the most zany, wacky, over the top game possible considering its tech. There's a lot of boring, generic, uninspired or just plain terrible Doom clones from the 90s, and many of them came out well after 1996. Go look up Operation Body Count if you care that much. Came out around the same time as RoTT, but it's a lot worse in pretty much every way, on top of being pretty damn dull and not being very easy on the eyes to put it nicely. RoTT did its own thing and did the most it could considering its development history and engine. RoTT is one of the few shooters from the early-mid 90s that I would say were worth playing.
  4. Maggle

    Which of The Following Weapons do You Use The Least?

    I use the chaingun the least, because it sucks. At least in Doom 2 it sucks. The damage is far too underwhelming for what it is. It makes sense that the BFG is currently ahead because of how rare it often is and how rare ammo for it can be, so ultimately that's probably my least used weapon from a practical standpoint, but assuming i already have all weapons i almost never touch the chaingun, i hate it. even as a sniping weapon i feel like i can deal much more damage at most ranges with the pump shotty unless the enemy is extremely far away. If i am attempting to snipe an enemy at extreme ranges i'm likely to get irritated by how little damage i'm doing and attempt to get closer so i can use the shotgun instead. there's almost no reason to use it.
  5. Maggle

    Whatever happened to Bloodcrusher II?

    I'm pretty sure it got cancelled. I personally didn't care much about the game. It marketed itself as a "return" of the retro-style FPS, even going as far as including a "lore" of sorts that it's actually a game from 1997 that never got released. Then it turns out it had the odd quirk of being a rogue-lite kinda game with heavy randomization of loot and procedurally generated dungeons kinda like you'd see in something like Binding of Isaac instead of pre-designed levels. Keep in mind, this was back in 2014. RNG-heavy games with procedurally-generated levels were exploding in popularity at the time while retro fps games were pretty much long dead. So the idea of bringing back a dead style of game and twisting it to be more like a style of game that's already extremely popular felt like a slap in the face, and that's when i lost interest in the project. I suspect i'm far from the only person who felt that way, and that may be part of why it got axed. If that kind of game came out today, i don't think it would be that controversial. it might even be really fun. i'm not opposed to a game like it, it just got revealed at a really bad time is all.
  6. Maggle

    Ever miss the analog world?

    I definitely don't miss CRT TVs. Some of those things were as big as a milk crate and weighed 27 tons, if you were lucky. Others would be about as big as a person, and it would take two people to move it around it was so big and heavy. And if you lived upstairs? Good luck. All for resolution that was terrible, colors that were muted, and a method of drawing images that made eye strain almost a certainty. Oh, and if you made the mistake of accidently tuning to the wrong channel, the loudest sound in the universe would suddenly play and instantly shatter the eardrums of anyone within a five mile radius. Fuck those old pieces of shit.
  7. Maggle

    Going Through The Serious Sam Games Again

    You get used to it after a while. Air momentum is a lot more aggressive in PK than most other games, making bunny hopping way easier and giving you some pretty incredible speed boosts. The average Painkiller level isn't anywhere near as big as a lot of Serious Sam levels either, barring the occasional exception like the Military Base. They're relatively compact, so it's hard to say you over-rely on the BHopping a lot. Maybe i'm just used to bunny hopping all over the place because i used to play Quake a lot.
  8. Maggle

    Revenant Homing Missiles

    if the revenant fires on an even numbered game tic, it homes. On an odd, it doesn't. I think that's how it works. Or from the player's perspective, it's basically just a 1 in 2 chance.
  9. Maggle

    Ever miss the analog world?

    All that stuff took up too much space and was too fragile. Nah, not really. I get having nostalgia for the days when you go with friends or family members to Blockbuster or Hollywood video and rent a few VHS tapes, because that's time spent with people you care about. Despite it being a rather mundane ritual, it can create memories that can stick with you for a while, especially if you don't see those people much nowadays. (Or at all.) Actually missing VHS tapes themselves? God no. Those things were a pain in the ass. When DVDs finally dropped, that was like a light from the heavens because having to deal with a jammed tape would ruin your whole day.
  10. Maggle

    Shovelware Society #13 - WAD.WAD Week

    Can't wait to play some ASGFTEETH.WAD and open some doors that are as big as an entire wall in large, square rooms full of enemies slightly too big for the map geometry, so they're entirely immobile.
  11. Maggle

    Boomer Shooters, Half-Life 1, and Halo: CE

    modern shooter map design be like: Halo did this >=(. ME ANGRY. Old game good. New game bad.
  12. Maggle

    Boomer Shooters, Half-Life 1, and Halo: CE

    I get more and more tired of this "boomer shooter vs modern shooter" argument every time it comes up, because every distinction made is often way too simplistic, way too biased, and ignores the changes made to game design over the years and why they were made. People just boil it all down to "boomer shooter is when the gun big and i move fast" and just leave it at that. I don't like the implication that there's only two types of shooter game either. Immersive sims were born around the same time the "boomer shooter" was, and those are nothing like boomer shooters or modern shooters at all. Go ahead, start a new game of Deus Ex and try to play it like it's doom, or even like halo. you will get smoked because it's a very different game from either of those, and games like that just get left out of these comparisons. There isn't just two types of FPS divided by the turn of the millennium, it's more complicated than that.
  13. Maggle

    funi map

    fuckyoutoo.wad
  14. Because wacky gimmick weapons may be fun to come up with but the fact of the matter is that overreliance on them sacrifices cohesion somewhat and they don't fit in every single setting. Games like Unreal, Turok, Prey 2006, and Painkiller make sense to have gimmick weapons because they are set in extremely hostile and alien otherworldly environments. Something like Hexen also has a lot of quirky and unusual weapons, but that is almost to be expected considering it's set in a fantasy world and you're using magic. Perfect Dark is inspired by spy fiction like James Bond, so some fancy spy gadgets like the Laptop gun are to be expected in a setting like that. These things work less so for a setting that's more grounded, like a standard WWII shooter or a game set in the modern day where you're an NYPD officer solving murders or something like that. Everything has a time and place, and your weapons should be thematically appropriate. The GES Biorifle or Electro-driver or Wraithverge or whatever aren't going to make much sense in a game like Farcry 5 or Condemned. I also take issue with the implication of this being a strictly modern thing, as there were countless 90s and early 2000s FPS games that also adhered to a strictly standard weapon loadout with few if any exceptions. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake 2, Marathon, Half-Life, Goldeneye, Medal of Honor, Quake 3, Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage, System Shock, the list goes on and on. Ultimately, all that matters is if the guns are fun. I don't really mind either way. Give me a severed alligator head that shoots razor-sharp jagged icicles of frozen sulfuric acid that's been dyed purple and blessed by a priest, or a Glock. Don't care. All that matters is which one feels better to use.
  15. A) Most Arena Shooters that come out nowadays are indie games. Indie games generally suffer from a lack of marketing, and depend heavily on word of mouth and social media for marketing instead. How much money did Mojang have to spend on ads for Minecraft back in 2010-11? 0$. That game's success hinged entirely on Youtube. Without that, it would have been dead in the water and just as relevant today as Infiniminer. That's just the way it is. B) Arena Shooters generally make no attempt to bring in new players. From basic movement mechanics over-relying on physics quirks to gameplay relying too much on knowing the map and all the weapon spawns, to the lack of tutorials and training modes, to the community itself being full of elitist try-hards, getting into an Arena Shooter today is intimidating to say the least. They also generally make no attempt at outreach to FPS fans of today, which is an important demographic that you absolutely need to make an FPS successful. (Obviously, right?) C) Here are some things that modern Arena Shooters need but largely don't have: - Trying something new with the formula. Don't just copy Q3 and UT99. Modern gamers aren't going to be interested because they don't know those games well, and fans of those games won't be interested either because they can just go play those. It's a losing battle. - Movement tech should be easy and approachable. Lots of games have cool movement options that are way the fuck easier than any rocket jump will ever be, so why play an arena shooter? How do you climb a wall in Apex Legends? Easy. You hold sprint and jump at a wall, and as long as it's low enough you can climb it. How do you climb a wall in Q3A? Well, you pull out the Plasma Rifle, you hug the wall and aim it at the wall at a very precise angle, shoot it at the wall, hurting yourself in the process, and hope to god the knockback works for you before someone shows up with a rocket launcher and kills you instantly. It's not the 1990s anymore. You're not the only game in town for movement. We're at a point where some Call of Duty games let you double jump and wall run by default. If a COD game has better movement mechanics than your Quake-ish Arena Shooter, you have some problems that need to be addressed. RJ'ing and stuff like that should be options for people who want it, absolutely, but cool movement should be available to everyone regardless of skill level. - Some modern shooter mechanics are simply more convenient, and should be in Arena Shooters too. Quick-Melee and Quick-grenade, for example. It'll be fine, it won't magically turn your game into a cover shooter, it's fun, people like it, no one wants to switch to a fist or a frag grenade as a separate weapon anymore. Plus it just slows the game down to switch to a different weapon to do things you could do just with the push of a button. Arena Shooters are all about speed, so why not? - Arena Shooters rely wayyyy too much on item management, like knowing where the weapon/powerup spawns are and precisely how long it takes for items to respawn is basically the key to victory in most cases. I'll be honest, this is straight up horrible game design. It doesn't matter how good you are at shooter games, if you don't know where the items are then 9 times out of 10 you lose. It doesn't matter if you're literally John Wick, if your opponent knows that every 30 secs there's going to be a Quad damage at this location and a BFG at another then they will have either a Quad or BFG every 30 seconds. And there is no fighting back. You're screwed. Most MP games don't encounter this issue. This is a fatal flaw unique to Arena Shooters and for some reason no one has thought for the past 25 years to fix it. The solution is simple: Randomize what spawns in the map and where, kinda like what Battle Royale games do nowadays. I don't care if some people don't like that, you can't just quad damage all your problems away. You need to work for your frags. And it will be much more fun for everyone. Also, more health pickups, please. Arena shooters also have an irritating tendency to not have enough health pickups, or to have them all split up as far away from eachother as possible. This is annoying, because every time i end a firefight nearly dead (which is very often, because i can't dodge hitscan machine gun fire) i end up getting only like 20 health back if i'm lucky. Then the same person i just killed respawns and immediately kills me because i have like 40 health and 10 armor. Stop being so stingy with health pickups. D) If there is marketing, it's always terrible. Do not advertise your game to the eSports crowd. The eSport crowd is a relatively small community that dislikes being pandered to. Whether or not your game ends up at EVO or something is up to them. You can't force it into eSports. It also sends the implicit message to casual gamers to stay away because most of the people playing are going to be elite eSports MLG gamers who will destroy you with their eyes closed. Bethesda's marketing strategy for Quake Champions was legitimately the stupidest thing I've ever seen. It killed that game, btw. It will never recover from the lost sales from that stupid ass E3 2019 trailer.
  16. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    FEAR has secret areas where you can go off the trail a bit to find a health or reflex upgrade or a secret gun or something. Also, stop giving this Alfonzo guy attention. I'm pretty sure he's just a troll. One who gave the game away way too early when he tried convincing people that Doom is some kind of open world sandbox lmao.
  17. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    "Non-linear level design is when there's locked doors and you have to backtrack sometimes. Unlike those shitty modern games where all you do is walk in a straight line and literally nothing happens!" Some people in this thread, apparently.
  18. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    "Openness to a degree" still just means semi-linear, because for the most part you are taking roughly the same path every time even if it deviates a bit. Alternate pathways and secrets can contribute to making the game feel fresh on multiple playthroughs, but that doesn't make it non-linear. I'm not really sure what you mean by "enemies that could move and follow you around the map". This sounds like pretty basic pathfinding, which pretty much every game had at the time and every game has now, and I don't see what it has to do with linearity in the game's level design. And I reject the notion that backtracking automatically makes a game less linear. If I took the entirety of Bioshock Infinite, changed nothing about its level design but just locked half the doors in the game and made the player find a key or switch to open it, that doesn't suddenly make the game less linear. It does pad the hell out of the game's length, though. Key and switch hunts generally aren't my favorite level design approach. Secondly, non-linearity isn't automatically good and linearity automatically bad. A game like FEAR may be a series of arena fights with corridors connecting them, but they're good arena fights so i don't see the problem. It's good at what it does. A game like Redneck Rampage may be fairly non-linear, but not in anyway that i feel works in its favor. Every level is a long, drawn out trial-and-error key hunt with no focus or sense of direction whatsoever. Every single level in that game would take the average player 20+ mins on a first playthrough. That's a game where non-linearity wasn't done right.
  19. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    You responded. To a point that evidently you don't seem to disagree with, but you misinterpreted it massively. I tried to patiently explain the point i was trying to make multiple times but you're still not understanding. So for one final time: I did not say old games aren't or cannot be technically impressive either through graphics, physics, detail, or mechanical depth. What I also didn't say is that retro games aren't impressive on any level. I didn't say that. What I did say is they generally aren't technically impressive compared to games made nowadays, (Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 came out nearly 17 years ago. So, not recent.) so saying that a game is "nothing special nowadays" is a moot point because you can say that about basically anything. That's it. Can we move on, now?
  20. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    These games were nowhere near as non-linear as some people seem to think they are. With the exception of something like Hexen which has hubworlds, level progression was always fairly straight forward. Sure, there would be a branching path here and there, secrets to find, the occasional moment when you'd have to backtrack a bit, but for the most part these are point A - point b games. Look at Hangar. Can you seriously tell me that level is suddenly "non-linear" because you can push a button at the beginning that opens the window and takes you a path that ultimately takes you to the same exact place anyway? Even something like Wolf 3d which is a series of mazes isn't really "non-linear", and definitely isn't open-ended. Your straight-forward path from beginning to end being confusing and having a shit-ton of deteurs and taking a long time doesn't suddenly make it non-linear. It's semi-linear at best.
  21. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    Old-School FPSs are not open ended sandbox games. Like, what the hell? Have we even played the same games? Grand Theft Auto is an open ended sandbox, not fucking Duke Nukem. Like, what?
  22. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    There's an old adage that "limitations breed creativity", and that's true for the most part. Old games are definitely a lot more creative because developers had to work with what little they had to make something great that people would remember. Every single type of game that exists nowadays (and every type of game that doesn't get made anymore) only exists because someone long ago dared to blaze the trail. I also tend to think older games had better balance, for the most part at least. Limitations meant the player couldn't use or do anything too advanced, so all the gear, equipment, items, weapons, skills, etc. in the game may be rather basic, but they feel distinctive. Everything has a purpose that makes it something you would want to bring with you on your journey. Modern games don't really do that. There's much more of a focus on having multiple variations on similar weapons. It's very common nowadays for a game to have multiple different models of rifle and like 20 different melee weapons. Which is nice for the realism factor, and i'm sure it's cool for the gun fans out there but that's just boring to me, and it makes games inherently less approachable because it's harder to tell intuitively what's better than another weapon in any given situation. Everything is either a slight variation on each other or direct upgrades on a very subtle curve. That's probably what frustrates me the most about modern game design. I wish items were more streamlined and distinctive. Quality over quantity.
  23. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    Because you're not understanding the point I was making. Retro games shouldn't be compared on their technological or innovative accomplishments to games of today. Games nowadays come with certain conveniences that older games didn't have and modern games definitely have the leg up in terms of tech. Saying a game from the early 2000s is "nothing special nowadays" doesn't take into account the time it came out and the ways in which it pushed boundaries at the time. Your example doesn't fit the scope of the argument i'm making because you weren't judging it by modern standards at all. The mechanics you held up from Severance, stenciled lighting and water reflections, aren't impressive in the modern era anymore, and the games you were comparing it to came out in 2004. What i'm complaining about is like if i said Severance is nothing special nowadays by comparing it to RPGs that came out now, like the Witcher 3 or some shit. Boring! Overrated! That's not exactly fair, is it? TL;DR "Nothing special now" is a bad argument against old games, because of course it isn't. Old games need to be judged on their own merits as games, or at least through the lens of the time they came out. Anything less is simply bad analysis.
  24. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    "MODERN. STANDARDS." That's a lot of games from 2004 being compared. You're not judging it by the standards of what games today can do, you're judging it by what games from around that era could and couldn't do. Which is good. Judging old games by modern standards isn't fair.
  25. Maggle

    F.E.A.R is a very overrated video game trilogy

    there is absolutely nothing technically impressive about 15-20 year old retro games in 2021. Retro games have to be judged by the standards of their time to be properly enjoyed and fairly judged in the modern era by someone who hasn't grown up with them. Even something that's relatively recent like from 2006 or something. The differences in tech are night and day. This isn't controversial. No one in 2021 is wowed by the graphics and physics of Castlevania 1 from 198 fucking six, ok? That's all i'm saying. Chill. Also, modern game engines are more than capable of leaky fish tanks. In fact, modern game engines can do that trick more convincingly and do much much more. Notice how the surface of the water never properly sways or splashes around either in reaction to the bullet entering the tank or the water level suddenly going down. I bet it also doesn't simulate water pressure realistically. If you shoot it multiple times, you probably get that same effect from multiple points. When what should happen is the water slowly trickles out the more holes instead of gushing out all at once because the water pressure is more evenly distributed across multiple bullet holes. Now I could be an asshole about it and give it shit for this, or i can accept that it was the early 2000s and the tech back then wasn't capable of doing this effect perfectly and just simply be impressed that they even managed to pull this off considering this is from an era of game physics where a lot of games didn't even have ragdolling yet. And what ragdolling there was didn't look particularly convincing.
×