|
Doom 3
Now that I've spent a few hours with this game (and now that I'm no longer quite so nervous that my system will explode at any moment while I'm playing it), I'm ready to give some more detailed impressions.
It's tempting to compare this to Half-Life; it's tempting to compare every shooter to Half-Life. Like that fabled game, you basically start out wandering around a mostly OK environment, and then everything goes to hell and suddenly former co-workers and other folks you expect to be on your side start shooting at you. And oh yeah, crazy alien thingies from the widder-shins dimension are out to get you to. So fine.
But the game I really want to compare it to -- at least in terms of atmosphere -- is System Shock 2. No, it doesn't have a weird accelerated simulation of weapon degradation. No, there's no RPG-lite skill system. But what there is is the creepiest damn space station you've EVER been on... and things are whispering to you. I could play SS2 for more than an hour at a time. Hell, sometimes I couldn't play it for more than ten minutes at a time. Because at any moment one of those evil zombie nannies was going to come for me, and y'know what? I was going to be out of bullets. And my god, that was a creepy dark mofo of a spaceship, and pretty much every shadow had some kind of space cyborg zombie in it. Brrrrrr.
Needless to say, I can only play Doom 3 for maybe an hour at a time. I think. So far I've made it forty minutes before saying, "Oh, it's probably stable, let's do some more testing in City of Heroes."
The other reason I want to compare it is because they pretty much lifted the storytelling mechanic from SS2, and I say Bravo! Yeah, sure, there are cutscenes. But more to the point, there's a super duper creepy audio environment full of weird, out-of-place announcements and promotional videos, creaks, moans, weird laughter, and the doomed last words of the poor saps whose PDAs you come across. The whole PDA thing is straight out of SS2: in that game, you got at a lot of the story by finding e-mails and audio logs, and trying to find a dark corner to read/listen in with your back against a wall that wasn't about to open. Usually, finding a PDA also means finding some kind of code that opens some kind of nearby locker, which is also a nice touch. I just came across a PDA where you got spam from www.martianbuddy.com (The Greatest Company Ever Conceived), which turns out to... well, you'll see. It's clever. It made me glad I had a second computer nearby to check it out on while I was playing.
The other thing that's just done really really well is the whole deformable environment. It's not so much that I'm deforming it (at least not yet; who knows what later weapons might do) but there's been instances of things getting bent or shattered in some pretty impressive ways. Like the first time you meet the hell... dog... thingie. Brrrrr. I mean, I knew what was gonna happen. I was even pointing the right way. But yikes!
Ultimately, the gameplay is straightforward infinite hallway keys & rooms & ammo design. Open a door. Enter a room. Destroy baddies. Don't die. Pick up stuff. Advance. Find a locked door. Find a key. Return to locked door. Advance. Strafe. Shoot. Aim for the unprotected bits. It's dressed up with swell graphics (oh, my, some of those death animations are impressive, especially at close range... which I don't recommend getting to), but it's just run & gun.
Except... except for the flashlight. Ohhhhh, the flashlight. Don't let the naysayers tell you otherwise, my friends: it's all about the flashlight. If you didn't have the flashlight, you'd just be strolling along a nice sunny desert like happy-go-lucky Gordon Freeman, living his fancy pants high-falutin' MIT graduate lifestyle. But NO! You're BETTER THAN THAT! You're a SPACE MARINE, and by god, you live by that flashlight. And you're no wussy-ass Master Chief, either, with a gun-mounted flashlight -- no sir, you've gotta make important tactical decisions at all times, decisions like -- am I gonna be better off seeing or shooting?
Better be quick with that flashlight toggle, boy. And better make sure that gun is reloaded before you start getting all fancy with poking in corners.
What makes the flashlight mechanic great is that you pretty much have to use it in every room to check things out. And you pretty much know that in every room, there's gonna be some corner that you'll wish you'd checked out first with that flashlight. And that you'd better have enough spatial awareness to not be flicking back to your chaingun when you've just illuminated the face of a space zombie from a foot away.
I love the flashlight.
The flashlight is my friend.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go read a happy story about unicorns in a well lit room for a few hours and hope I don't whimper too loud. Now, where's that flashlight...?
Also, another tech note: I throttled my AGP aperture back to 64MB, and that helped a lot with the initial stuttering I was seeing. I'm fairly sure it was a paging issue, and throttling back the AGP aperture gives Doom 3 the working space it needs a 512MB RAM situation. There's still some initial stutter that frankly just wasn't there with 1GB, but scaling back to one stick seems to have brought stability, so oh well. Getting rid of the initial stutter seems to be the only benefit to having more RAM; once the working set is in, it runs silky smooth in 512MB. But anyway, you don't care, because you're not dumb enough to build your own machine to play this. 11:30:26 PM () 
|
|
