johnboy3434

Mods: I wasn't sure if this belonged here or in Everything Else. It is "related to Doom" like the forum description says, but not exclusively. Pedantic Bullshit; Skip This Paragraph: I mean, strictly speaking the term is nonsense. The absolute youngest baby boomers would have been 27 years old when Wolfenstein 3-D came out. Yeah, Wolf3D wasn't the first FPS, but it was the first one that really mattered, and the generation in question would have viewed such things as children's toys by that age. The people enjoying Wolf3D would have been Gen Xers and Millennial kids (the oldest at the time being 11) that managed to sneak it by inattentive parents. So "boomer" in this case simply means "too old to be a hep cat". Me, personally? My rule of thumb is that if a game A.) is by any reasonable definition an FPS and B.) was built off of the Wolf3D, Raven, Doom, or Build engines (or any derived proxies thereof), then it is absolutely a boomer shooter. Also, if an FPS is built in clear imitation of the titles on the above engines, it's probably a boomer shooter. In other words, I define the term as "2.5D" shooters who share or would have you think they share a technical lineage with the 90s classics everyone knows about. I may be wrong, but I think I differ from just about everyone here in considering the leap to fully-rendered-3D-everything as a cutoff point. I imagine anyone here would include Quake 1/2-derived FPSs under the "boomer shooter" banner as the last of the glory days. But to me, the visual leap is too much of a paradigm change.

Based on my memories of high school, I can kick the shit out of graph paper.

Without checking, I think there were enough to count on one hand, and before 2013's Rise of the Triad remake I don't think there were any with commercial aspirations. Just well-made hobby projects and/or fan mods.

I was wondering which of the expansions/TCs for the first two Quake games went through the proper channels and obtained Id's license/permission for their new Quake content. The two Mission Packs for each game are no-brainers, and we know for a fact that Q!Zone and Malice had such an arrangement with Id because they saw release in a bundle with the first Quake itself. I don't know with any certainty, but I would guess that X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse had arrangements as well, what with Marvel Comics being directly involved in its creation at a time when the company was not in any condition to tempt fate with expensive lawsuits. Beyond that, I know nothing. Any help?

Wouldn't you still need the engine in order to make the expansion in the first place, though?

I mean specifically "it's a dumb/inaccurate name, they should have called it this or that instead". Well they didn't, so there. Plus 99% of what's been repeatedly bandied back and forth about the term "boomer" was already typed out right there in my OP under the heading "pedantic bullshit", so it's even more repetitive than it seems.

So, any chance we can drop the bullshit semantics about the name?

That's what the name would imply, but that's not what it actually means. Usage determines definition, and while usage of the term "boomer shooter" can be inexact and vague (hence this thread), under no circumstances has it ever extended to the games you're talking about. The idea is very much centered on games that flourished primarily in the 90s.

Saying/predicting that the state of [insert video game genre here] is going to begin/continue to degrade into tripe is not a conversation worth starting. First off, and the most obvious point: What is good to one person is not good to another, and vice-versa, so the narrative of a slide in quality is already dependent upon the worldview of the person making the remark, which means the entire conversation is framed on that person's turf. Second point: Let's pretend that everyone has the exact same opinion on what constitutes good and bad. Saying that things are going to get worse is still a meaningless statement, because it's eventually going to be correct simply by law of large numbers. Eventually, every industry has a series of notable missteps, and for a time things aren't as good as they used to be. Third point: Let's also pretend, in addition to no variation in opinions, that things are noticeably getting worse right this very moment and everyone can see it. At that point we need the core of the thesis statement: "So what?" The consequence is... that FPS games won't be as good as they've been being. Shock. Horror. Woe upon all our houses. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. So, this entire argument that (as you put it) some people feel so strongly about is 1.) myopic, 2.) unfalsifiable, and 3.) trivial. It's not that we have unrealistic optimism, it's that we don't really care if the outcome is optimistic or not. You can't eat Doom, so don't treat the lack of Doom like a lack of food.

If I had to guess, it would be stuff like heavy reliance on peek-a-boo shots, taking advantage of monster-stopping lines in the map instead of getting into the middle of the fray like the WAD author probably intended, and just generally not ripping and tearing.

Uhh... you okay, buddy? That post took a turn towards "the Illuminati want to put estrogen in your drinking water" at the end.

So, if you run Doom in 4K or something similar and enable GZDoom's setting that shows thing sprites on the automap... they are big. So big that they obscure the map around them. Trying different screen resolutions shows that this is directly related to the size of the sprites. I've looked through all the options menus and can't find anything that returns them to their correct size. Any help?

I tried loading the latest release of Hacx 2.0 (which I put in the <Username>/Saved Games/iD Software/Doom 2/WADs folder, making it accessible in the "Add Ons" menu), and the game crashed upon trying to load the first level. I tried version 1.1 (the one that was an expansion of Doom II rather than a standalone IWAD), and it played, but with all sorts of bugs that research showed me were the result of not using the Dehacked file that came with it. So I imported the DEH file into HACX.WAD in Slade, renamed it "dehacked", saved the WAD, and... now it crashes just like 2.0 did. I'm a total novice at this, so I'm currently at a loss. Far as I can tell, both Perdition's Gate and Hell to Pay are working just fine. Any ideas from more experienced players?

...Never mind. I played the first couple levels of PG, saw nothing amiss, and figured it worked. Since HtP was made by the same people at the same time, I assumed it operated similarly and (like an idiot) didn't check. You're right: it auto-crashed. So, I guess the three licensed-but-still-unofficial expansions are all borked on the Unity port. Too bad. It'd be great if they were released as official add-ons. Again, unless someone has figured out a workaround.

So, pretend you are assigned a random level. On this level, you play on Ultra-Violence+ (in non-Unity ports, that means Ultra-Violence difficulty using the -fast parameter and faking a multiplayer session) or Watch Me Die if playing Doom 64, you pistol-start, and you must finish the level with 100% kills, 100% items, and 100% secrets (adjusting for bugs that may prevent you from getting exactly 100%), and you must do it in one run without saving or dying. Which level from the 185 "classic" Doom maps would you dread getting the most? The 185 maps include Doom plus "Thy Flesh Consumed", Doom II plus "The Master Levels", Final Doom, and Doom 64. I personally consider later expansions like "No Rest for the Living", "The Lost Levels", and the retroactively-official add-ons for the Unity ports to be "pseudo-classic" levels. As for me, the idea of pistol-starting "Perfect Hatred" makes me feel tired. So many goddamn Barons.

I'm sorry, but I can't quite parse what you're saying. As far as I'm aware, picking the Ultra-Violence+ difficulty on the Unity ports is equivalent to starting other source ports with -skill 4 -fast -solo-net as parameters in terms of gameplay. What am I describing poorly?

Forgot to specify that. Edited now. Thanks. EDIT: You know, as cliché as the answer is, "Go 2 It" might be really, really bad. You get one extra megasphere and 42 extra energy cell packs in order to deal with 22 extra Cyberdemons. The extra ammo given amounts to 105 rounds for the BFG, so I guess the implication is to just spam it until you win.

I tried entering the appropriate parameters on the Doom executable, but the game just starts as normal with the logos, title screen and default demos.

I feel like an idiot for not being able to figure this out, but I have no idea how to load the PK3 files in PrBoom+. And even if the files are totally incompatible, I can't seem to make anything happen with the unzipped contents of the PK3 files either. Could I get a helping hand?

And I'm assuming I would have to custom-build said WAD myself?

According to the Doom Fandom wiki, the otherwise unofficial Doom II expansion/total conversion Hacx: Twitch 'n Kill was released with Id Software's blessing after the developer Banjo Software paid Id for a "limited add-on license". I wasn't aware that any of the myriad non-Id episode/level packs released for sale actually paid for the right to do so, and now I'm wondering if Hacx was the only one. Anybody here with encyclopedic knowledge of old Doom releases want to share some knowledge?

According to the votes of the users on GameFAQs, this is how the Doom games rank in difficulty on a scale of one to five, with five being the hardest: 1.) Final Doom - 3.78 2.) Doom 64 - 3.71 3.) Doom (2016) - 3.42 4.) Doom II - 3.39 5.) Doom (1993) - 3.31 6.) Doom 3 - 3.15 For reference, a difficulty rating of three is considered "perfect" difficulty, neither easy nor hard. The games not included in this list (namely: RPG, Resurrection, II RPG, and VFR) don't have enough votes to establish a solid consensus, but the votes that they do have give them ratings of 2.96, 3.14, 3.20, and 3.24, respectively. Do you agree with this ranking, or do you think the games need to be shuffled around a bit? In your judgment, take the "complete" version of each game into consideration. In other words, "Thy Flesh Consumed" included with the original, Master Levels and "No Rest for the Living" included with Doom II, Resurrection of Evil and "Lost Mission" included with Doom 3, and the three multiplayer DLCs with the 2016 game.

Let's say you're trying to 100% a particular Doom game. Is there a game in the series that you think you would get completely fed up with by the time you finished? Maybe there's just not enough variety to last quite that long. Maybe the difficulty sucks the fun out of things before you can finally overcome it. Point is, when you finally put down the controller for the last time, you're less proud of yourself for beating it and more glad that it's all over. Do you have this experience with any particular game in the series? Just to clarify, 100% includes any expansions released later. However, for sanity's sake, let's not count the "Maximum Doom" levels or else 100%ing either of the first two games would become an endless nightmare.

That's how I meant the topic to be: 100% kills, items, and secrets on each map (when possible). Just about everyone answering just went with the idea of merely beating the game, though.

According to information found in another thread I started and extra reading elsewhere, the only "unofficial" commercial add-ons to the Doom games that actually paid Id for the necessary license were Hacx, Hell to Pay, and Perdition's Gate. Other releases, like Lost Episodes of Doom and (much later) John Romero's own Sigil, got around the commercial licensing fee by including the actual game content as merely a free bonus to some other product (specifically a map-building guide/walkthrough and a Buckethead soundtrack, respectively). But D!Zone and other assorted map packs don't have that defense. They were clearly selling files as add-ons to the Doom games, and nothing else. And Id personnel have gone on record that they weren't happy about it. So... why didn't they pursue legal action?