Monday, August 09, 2004
Do penguins go to hell?
Is Doom 3 the scariest game of all time? Well, I don’t think so, but I did get to play it a few days ago and, though my time with the game was brief, I can safely say this is number one on my list of games I need to play when they finally get ported off that most archaic of gaming platforms – the PC – and get brought into my home via the modern wonders of the Xbox. Now that I’ve spat out a most unwieldy run-on sentence, it is time to document my adventures controlling a marine in hell with only a mouse and keyboard at my disposal.
The game starts the player off in a kind of level zero. You walk around, talking to various people and just kind of hang out, waiting for something exciting to happen. Eventually, for reasons unknown to me, the floor cracks open and the occupants of hell overrun the previously peaceful marine base. This is something that I had to learn by watching Lanyon play the game.
My experience was much, much different. Upon firing up the game and finding myself in a dark room with nary a flashlight to my name, I began to panic. Though there were no actual bad guys at this point, the suffocating atmosphere was crushing me like a ton of marshmallow peeps, and the fear of having to eventual combat the beasts of hell with the rudimentary mouse controls, was enough to make me crawl into a tiny hole.
And that, my friends, is the very first thing I did after the cut scenes had ceased boring me. I briefly walked around the very first room in the game, couldn’t find exactly where to go (it’s dark, mind you), so I attempted to crouch and crawl into a small cubbyhole. This may make sense if the tunnel led to somewhere, but, even if I could actually fit in the hole, I would have promptly found myself against a wall. Fortunately, Lanyon stepped in before I made too big an ass out of myself, and told me where to go.
After a minute of slowly navigating the dark control room, I found myself against a rail overlooking a lava pit. I quickly panicked. The W button, which had so faithfully moved me forward these past 60 seconds, was now offering me no help at all. I swung the mouse wildly over the pad, trying to see if there was some way past this horrible little rail. Finding nothing, I did the only logical thing a person in my position could do – I hit the space bar, throwing my highly trained marine body into the fiery depths of hell. To recap – in my first minute of playing I attempted to wedge myself in a small hole in the wall and died some time before the first enemy even appeared. Not the experience John Carmack envisioned those late nights coding this bad boy.
As the level reloaded to give me a second chance at playing, Lanyon was shocked to discover the level had changed. As I mentioned earlier, the game is designed to let you get used to the controls as you walk around the base with no enemies present. You talk to people, learn some stories, and then, only after you have played game 10 minutes, does the first enemy appear. By dying before I had triggered any of the events, the game got so confused it just assumed it had mistaken how I died, and placed me in the level after the minions from hell had already overrun the base.
That means that I was so bad, testers and coders working tirelessly on this game for years, never encountered the situation of my first play through. They falsely assumed that any person playing Doom 3 would at least be able to survive long enough for the first enemy to appear. Oh, how very wrong they were.
My time after the enemies began to attack me did not last very long. Though I had a flashlight, shotgun and pistol at my disposal, I could barely survive the first fight. This is not the fault of the game, however, so I’ll try to keep my horrible playing out of the rest of these impressions. The game is creepy because you simply cannot see anything. The entire time you walk around the base you have to make sure your flashlight is out. If you walk with your gun out you will not see anything. This means that, when an enemy attacks you, and you have to put your flashlight away and take out your gun, you find yourself firing blindly towards sound. After only 5 minutes of trying to fight these seemingly invisible monsters my nerves were completely shot.
All told, I probably only played the game about 10 minutes, if not less. Maybe my opinion is not the most trustworthy around, but I really enjoyed my experience. Give me the Xbox controller and I would have had a blast with the game. Amazing graphics and an appearance from a robot Satan, what could be better? In conclusion, John Carmack is more talented than John Romero.
The game starts the player off in a kind of level zero. You walk around, talking to various people and just kind of hang out, waiting for something exciting to happen. Eventually, for reasons unknown to me, the floor cracks open and the occupants of hell overrun the previously peaceful marine base. This is something that I had to learn by watching Lanyon play the game.
My experience was much, much different. Upon firing up the game and finding myself in a dark room with nary a flashlight to my name, I began to panic. Though there were no actual bad guys at this point, the suffocating atmosphere was crushing me like a ton of marshmallow peeps, and the fear of having to eventual combat the beasts of hell with the rudimentary mouse controls, was enough to make me crawl into a tiny hole.
And that, my friends, is the very first thing I did after the cut scenes had ceased boring me. I briefly walked around the very first room in the game, couldn’t find exactly where to go (it’s dark, mind you), so I attempted to crouch and crawl into a small cubbyhole. This may make sense if the tunnel led to somewhere, but, even if I could actually fit in the hole, I would have promptly found myself against a wall. Fortunately, Lanyon stepped in before I made too big an ass out of myself, and told me where to go.
After a minute of slowly navigating the dark control room, I found myself against a rail overlooking a lava pit. I quickly panicked. The W button, which had so faithfully moved me forward these past 60 seconds, was now offering me no help at all. I swung the mouse wildly over the pad, trying to see if there was some way past this horrible little rail. Finding nothing, I did the only logical thing a person in my position could do – I hit the space bar, throwing my highly trained marine body into the fiery depths of hell. To recap – in my first minute of playing I attempted to wedge myself in a small hole in the wall and died some time before the first enemy even appeared. Not the experience John Carmack envisioned those late nights coding this bad boy.
As the level reloaded to give me a second chance at playing, Lanyon was shocked to discover the level had changed. As I mentioned earlier, the game is designed to let you get used to the controls as you walk around the base with no enemies present. You talk to people, learn some stories, and then, only after you have played game 10 minutes, does the first enemy appear. By dying before I had triggered any of the events, the game got so confused it just assumed it had mistaken how I died, and placed me in the level after the minions from hell had already overrun the base.
That means that I was so bad, testers and coders working tirelessly on this game for years, never encountered the situation of my first play through. They falsely assumed that any person playing Doom 3 would at least be able to survive long enough for the first enemy to appear. Oh, how very wrong they were.
My time after the enemies began to attack me did not last very long. Though I had a flashlight, shotgun and pistol at my disposal, I could barely survive the first fight. This is not the fault of the game, however, so I’ll try to keep my horrible playing out of the rest of these impressions. The game is creepy because you simply cannot see anything. The entire time you walk around the base you have to make sure your flashlight is out. If you walk with your gun out you will not see anything. This means that, when an enemy attacks you, and you have to put your flashlight away and take out your gun, you find yourself firing blindly towards sound. After only 5 minutes of trying to fight these seemingly invisible monsters my nerves were completely shot.
All told, I probably only played the game about 10 minutes, if not less. Maybe my opinion is not the most trustworthy around, but I really enjoyed my experience. Give me the Xbox controller and I would have had a blast with the game. Amazing graphics and an appearance from a robot Satan, what could be better? In conclusion, John Carmack is more talented than John Romero.
// posted by Tom @ 1:13 PM 
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