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BuffGUh

So do you guys like Wolfenstein 3D?

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Bucket said:

I'd imagined a Wolf3D source port with features like splitscreen, co-op, new difficulty features and a "survival" mode where you face waves of Nazis. Sadly, I'd never be able to undertake something like that.

Go to the ZDoom forums in the "off-topic" thread. You'll see SplitWolf in the list of threads!

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I dreamed about a Wolf3D sourceport which actually inserts Deathmatch spawn-points into the mazes and can support up to 8-players, and it would feel just like playing Duke3D on a network. Without any of this split-screen ugliness.

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Split screen on a PC is rather silly, or at least it makes the keyboard cramped if you only have one. Though Doom Legacy it is a nice feature.

Isn't there a mod for Wolf3D multiplayer? For either the Doom engine or Wolf engine, I think the Doom engine has a mod... I don't know about WOlf3D having a multiplayer mod.

Also, good question... I wonder if anyone ever played Operation Body Count multiplayer...

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The biggest issue I have with it is that I never found a way to raise the mouse sensitivity over the maximum value allowed from the menu. In DOOM you can set it to more than 9 by editing the CFG, but the Wolfenstein configuration file is not written in a human-readable way.

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Clonehunter said:

Split screen on a PC is rather silly, or at least it makes the keyboard cramped if you only have one.


Hey it worked well and was a big selling point for Lotus Turbo Challenge...then again most people tended to use joysticks for gaming, back then....

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Maes said:

Lotus Turbo Challenge

I just got a nostalgia boner.

At the time I only had access to the Mega Drive/Genesis version of the game, but still. Fun times.

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myk said:

The biggest issue I have with it is that I never found a way to raise the mouse sensitivity over the maximum value allowed from the menu. In DOOM you can set it to more than 9 by editing the CFG, but the Wolfenstein configuration file is not written in a human-readable way.

Yeah, I needed a "gaming" mouse to work around that. I simply increased the sensitivity from its hardware button. After that, I was able to play Wolfenstein or Blake Stone only with the mouse, no keyboard needed.

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Clonehunter said:

Split screen on a PC is rather silly, or at least it makes the keyboard cramped if you only have one.


It worked fine for Hired Guns, with 4-way split screen (one quadrant for each player). One dude had gamepad, another mouse, and two others on each side of keyboard (full size Amiga keyboard with numeric pad).

Sure, everyone was crowded around the same monitor, but anyway not everyone had a computer back then, much less network hardware.

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myk said:

The biggest issue I have with it is that I never found a way to raise the mouse sensitivity over the maximum value allowed from the menu. In DOOM you can set it to more than 9 by editing the CFG, but the Wolfenstein configuration file is not written in a human-readable way.

On top of that, there is a horizontal mouse speed cap, which to me is the plague because it prevents me from doing quick turns that I do in basically every FPS ever.

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Clonehunter said:

Split screen on a PC is rather silly, or at least it makes the keyboard cramped if you only have one.

What's silly is having split screen support in a game but not making it easily accessible on the PC. This is the one area where consoles have trumped PCs for years, and it doesn't need to be this way. Your buddy can always use a controller, you know.

myk said:

The biggest issue I have with it is that I never found a way to raise the mouse sensitivity over the maximum value allowed from the menu. In DOOM you can set it to more than 9 by editing the CFG, but the Wolfenstein configuration file is not written in a human-readable way.

The lack of strafe keys killed playing it with a mouse for me. I used to be pretty good with the keyboard alone, but that skill is gone now.

I got pretty big into Wolfy after rediscovering Doom. A friend of mine at the time kept bringing the game up, and I finally sought out the shareware copy and got it running. It was fun, I did eventually buy the full version (complete with SOD and its lost episodes), but I don't think I ever played through every episode. The gameplay just doesn't hold my interest and there's not much going for the level design either. Controls feel really clunky compared to Doom, too.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

The lack of strafe keys killed playing it with a mouse for me. I used to be pretty good with the keyboard alone, but that skill is gone now.

It's wired in the code so that you cannot strafe and turn at the same time. But for most situations, you don't need to circle-strafe – all enemies fire instant-hit bullets on you. All you need is to run (strafe) for cover.

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Yeah, but it's like trying to go about your daily tasks using your recessive hand. You're perfectly capable of doing it, but it runs counter to the way you've been doing things for years.

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For me there's only a modicum of nostalgia, and it's mostly associated with quirky fascinations (eg. the DeIce installer, the way the game lit up faux LEDs like a mixing desk to indicated successfully initialised hardware, and that enchanting SoundBlaster FM synth tone) as well as the halo-effect nostalgia of the other popular DOS classics of the time. What really kill the mood every time I consider a Wolf3D marathon on a rainy day are the death sounds. I wince every time I hear "mein leben!" -- the voice acting sounds like a best-2-outta-3 deal, and might have been passable in 1992 on SB16s with shitty earbuds, but now the sample clipping is painfully obvious and detracts from any atmosphere it might otherwise entertain. It also just feels embarrassing to play, even by myself, for that reason. Sounds that close to human dialogue just can't afford to be that repetitive. Similarly, any time I install Unreal Tournament, bot taunts are off immediately.

Then there was the time I started playing it in front of a good friend of my mother, not realising she'd been a prisoner of war. That memory doesn't help.

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printz said:

all enemies fire instant-hit bullets on you. All you need is to run (strafe) for cover.


That pretty much made the gameplay more shallow than Space Invaders'. Any head-on enemy encounter meant that you WOULD take damage unless you fired first (and more), which once you got the chaingun was pretty much guaranteed.

No tactics involved unless you called entering a room/teasing/chokepoint turkey-shooting a "tactic". Well, it is...only that it's the ONLY one applicable for regular fights. Only Boss and ghost fights were markedly different, because they wouldn't simply go down in a few hits and/or they fired slow-travelling projectiles.

durisnonfrangor said:

the voice acting sounds like a best-2-outta-3 deal, and might have been passable in 1992 on SB16s with shitty earbuds, but now the sample clipping is painfully obvious and detracts from any atmosphere


The sound had always been pretty weak in Wolf3D, even by the standards of the time. No sound mixing routine (1 channel playback for digital sounds? Really? Consider that the demoscene and some companies like EPIC or Digital Illusians used full-fledged digital module music by 1992). The samples themselves were more fit for an early 80s arcade machine, for the same reason (compare e.g. Amiga games or Epic Megagames/demoscene productions of the time). Even other DOS games of the time that used a simple Soundblaster one-channel "sound system" had better samples!

As for earbuds....in my book, shitty "bucket sound" earbuds are a mark of the 00s. Even the worst pair of 90s earbuds I ever owned sounded better than the shit that gets bundled with cheapo MP3 players and FM scan radios nowadays.

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I'm not too fond of it's maziness really, I prefer RTCW over it and I'm okay with Wolfenstein 2009.

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I'll play it every now and again, for a bit of fun, but I'm much more disposed to Doom. Although for some reason, my ex can't get enough of Wolf3D. I've tried getting her into Doom, but she finds them "too dark and serious," whereas Wolf3D is more cartoonish, I guess.

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Avoozl said:

I'm not too fond of it's maziness really, I prefer RTCW over it and I'm okay with Wolfenstein 2009.

Comparing RTCW with 1992 wolf is just unfair because RTCW is... almost perfect. =P (pretty biased opinion here from a guy who finished both PC and PS2 versions almost 10 times together).

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I thought it was awesome until I got Doom a year or two later then I never touched it again. Then I forgot about Doom when Quake came out.

In the end I come back to Doom periodically and the others not nearly as often.

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Played it a handful of times, but even as a timewaster it's leagues below Doom IMO; partly due to it's sheer simplicity, and partly because every level looks almost identical.

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(empty) said:

Played it a handful of times, but even as a timewaster it's leagues below Doom IMO; partly due to it's sheer simplicity, and partly because every level looks almost identical.

That's true. I usually get lost because of identical rooms. And welcome to doomworld.

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The movement system of Wolf3d is also pretty poor. There's even less feeling to it than in your average Modern Military Shooter FPS.

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The movement system is sub-elementary, really. Let alone view bobbing, there's zero metering of movement apart from the mouse multiplier in the options (which entailed some jerkiness -- I recall mention of correcting "premature integralisation" for the iPhone port, don't know if related). Using DOS mouse driver TSRs from the day like DMOUSE meant you could bump up the sensitivity to spastic values and go from one end of a very long hallway to another instantaneously. No input filtering either -- if you're up against a wall it will retrigger the subtle push-on-wall sound just as quickly as it receives events. That's what I've observed in DOSBox, anyway.

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Lots of my childhood video gaming memories go to Wolfenstein. It was an awesome game and still is, except that now I don't play it by myself any more. The Nazi theme really gives it way more personality than Doom (every time I see a holocaust documentary, I want to shoot some Nazis in Wolf), and in many places the game itself is creepier than Doom (the simplistic architecture combined with insane mazes helps make it feel eerie).

The PC sound effects are priceless (I grew up with them!) The treasure gathering sounds especially made the game feel like a quest.

The Sound Blaster sounds are weaker, especially as you grow up (fake, meaningless wording), and current emulators (DOSBox) make the PC sound effects seem too smooth compared to how rugged they sounded on real buzzers.

I understand Doom's complexity and higher potential for interesting gameplay, but the setting is much less interesting than historically-themed Wolf3D, and its monsters aren't any more intelligent or threatening than similarly frequent Wolf Nazis. Quite the reverse, it has pathetically slow and manageable Imps and Demons who continually growl their positions to you.

Last but not least, any kit that lets you play Wolfenstein-extracted maps under ZDoom, and comes packed with the full missions, is total warez and should disappear into the underground.

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I've always hated it because it has terrible game feel. Movement is rigid, attacks don't pack any punch, and there's very little meaningful gameplay.

I can respect it for what it is, though.

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Razen said:

Movement is rigid, attacks don't pack any punch, and there's very little meaningful gameplay.

I guess you haven't tried Spear Resurrection and End Of Destiny yet. There's teleporters and puzzles galore in those add-ons to spice up the gameplay. Along with new weapons which are less cartoony and more serious-looking.

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