...Re-release DOOM.
Having clocked more hours than is strictly healthy on FPS action, I have come to the conclusion that I am getting bored with them. I'm not saying it's not fun, but the prospect of trudging through yet another brown and grey generic landscape armed with two guns and bones that re-knit themselves if I can avoid being shot for .3 of a second is getting really, really tiresome. In fact, I got so tired of it I went and played DOOM for most of the weekend, and had a bloody great time doing so!
Let's take a moment to sort the wheat from the chaff here; Suburbs on Ultra Violence (PSX copy doesn't allow Nightmare...). I'm sure some of you remember. Specifically, I'm sure some of you remember how many enemies spawn the moment you get to the top of the tower in the southwest corner of the map. That was a laugh riot; a furious storm of rockets, bullets and plasma later, and I stagger clear with a warm glow in my chest thinking "Holy shit, I just butchered half an army!" This map remains my favourite purely because of that frantic spawn session. There are others, of course, but Suburbs has a special place in my heart.
Now, to explain WHY that was so much fun, we need to understand a few core concepts of play;
1) High Octane Mayhem:
DOOM plays fast. You're always moving, and moving at decent speed. You can circle-strife your way through the mayhem, always shooting, never stopping. Cover-hugging is for people who want to get ambushed and die - you stay alive by staying mobile. This is NOT how modern games are played; in a modern FPS, you hide. In a modern FPS, you go slowly and carefully. DOOM punishes this timidity, whilst rewarding balls-out brovado.
2) No Health Regen:
A fully kitted out player can take a lot of hits. Fully healed and armoured, a player can afford a few mistakes as they storm through the carnage and seek to obliterate everything else that moves. However, you can't take too many hits, and you don't heal just by cowering in the corner. The game, therefore, has a completely different set of tactics. As before, movement is key, only this time it's not about rushing the enemy; it's about rushing THROUGH the enemy, or perhaps away from them. When the chips are down the player has to quickly work out an escape route, flee to the nearest health and/or ammo, then get back into the fight.
This kind of on-the-fly resource management is all but gone from modern games. Hell, Duke Nukem is the last game I played where, in single player at least, I ever had any worries about AMMO, let alone health; modern games also seem to believe players should always have far more bullets than they'll ever need.
3) DOOM breaks its own rules:
Remember how important I said mobility is in DOOM? Well, DOOM knows it too. DOOM also knows it doesn't want you to win, so it likes to put you in narrow, winding corridors where you cannot fully exploit your advantages of movement. It likes to trap you, ambush you and scare the living hell out of you by sticking Mancubi and Hell Knights behind every bloody door. DOOM likes to teleport enemies into cramped spaces and laughs when you panic-fire a rocket into them, baking your own face in the backblast. DOOM has a way of terrifying the player that modern shooters never could; it lets us see how strong we are, then it makes us weak. It lets us learn how to render enemy numbers meaningless, then it denies us those means.
What this DOES do, however, is make us thankful for the times we CAN exploit those tactics. After countless cramped, heart-stopping tunnel fights it feels wonderful to step into a vast, open courtyard full of enemies and say "Ha! Now you're all screwed!"
It's better than any set piece play-as-you-watch cinematic. It's more intense than any rail-shooting vehicle segment. It's leaps and bounds beyond the "Here's a God Mode gun, go nuts!" level. DOOM simply puts you into an arena against a massive horde of enemies, and lets you discover just how good you are.
4) DOOM is pure:
There's a story to DOOM. Here it is: You're a Space Marine. Your team is dead, killed by the legions of Hell that came pouring out of a portal on Mars, and now the only thing between them and ruling the Red Planet (or Earth, if you're playing the sequel) is you. Good luck with that.
Yes, we really are done with the story now. That's all there is. There's no plot developments during play, no ancilliary characters bleating about how much they miss their wife and children, no scientists to rescue, no tedious cutscenes about people we don't care about, no loud-mouth douchebag cunts who say "fuck" every other word and ruin the game at every opportunity, and best of all no FUCKING! ESCORT! MISSIONS! All of that can go hang as far as DOOM is concerned - there's nothing between you and the exit but a few keys, the occasional trap, some lava / toxic waste and legion upon legion of Hell's best bullet-catchers.
In this day and age, we need some of that purity; we need a game where the story is something that happens in the Intro sequence, and then perhaps during the End Credits. It would be nice, for once, to have an FPS that isn't trying to make me care about things I don't care about - yeah, I'm sure you're really proud of Rico's intricate backstory and his fucking tourettes, but I'm here to shoot people, so kindly get that cutscene out of my face!
Now I want to make it clear that not ALL games should be like this. There is definitely a place for story-driven, 2-weapon based, cover-hugging, real-is-brown FPS titles. However, just because you CAN do these things does not mean you SHOULD. A little back to our roots purity would not go amiss now and then.
Now if you'll excuse me, "Barrels of Fun" is waiting, and I'm not sure whether the 'fun' is going to be mine or the game's...
Having clocked more hours than is strictly healthy on FPS action, I have come to the conclusion that I am getting bored with them. I'm not saying it's not fun, but the prospect of trudging through yet another brown and grey generic landscape armed with two guns and bones that re-knit themselves if I can avoid being shot for .3 of a second is getting really, really tiresome. In fact, I got so tired of it I went and played DOOM for most of the weekend, and had a bloody great time doing so!
Let's take a moment to sort the wheat from the chaff here; Suburbs on Ultra Violence (PSX copy doesn't allow Nightmare...). I'm sure some of you remember. Specifically, I'm sure some of you remember how many enemies spawn the moment you get to the top of the tower in the southwest corner of the map. That was a laugh riot; a furious storm of rockets, bullets and plasma later, and I stagger clear with a warm glow in my chest thinking "Holy shit, I just butchered half an army!" This map remains my favourite purely because of that frantic spawn session. There are others, of course, but Suburbs has a special place in my heart.
Now, to explain WHY that was so much fun, we need to understand a few core concepts of play;
1) High Octane Mayhem:
DOOM plays fast. You're always moving, and moving at decent speed. You can circle-strife your way through the mayhem, always shooting, never stopping. Cover-hugging is for people who want to get ambushed and die - you stay alive by staying mobile. This is NOT how modern games are played; in a modern FPS, you hide. In a modern FPS, you go slowly and carefully. DOOM punishes this timidity, whilst rewarding balls-out brovado.
2) No Health Regen:
A fully kitted out player can take a lot of hits. Fully healed and armoured, a player can afford a few mistakes as they storm through the carnage and seek to obliterate everything else that moves. However, you can't take too many hits, and you don't heal just by cowering in the corner. The game, therefore, has a completely different set of tactics. As before, movement is key, only this time it's not about rushing the enemy; it's about rushing THROUGH the enemy, or perhaps away from them. When the chips are down the player has to quickly work out an escape route, flee to the nearest health and/or ammo, then get back into the fight.
This kind of on-the-fly resource management is all but gone from modern games. Hell, Duke Nukem is the last game I played where, in single player at least, I ever had any worries about AMMO, let alone health; modern games also seem to believe players should always have far more bullets than they'll ever need.
3) DOOM breaks its own rules:
Remember how important I said mobility is in DOOM? Well, DOOM knows it too. DOOM also knows it doesn't want you to win, so it likes to put you in narrow, winding corridors where you cannot fully exploit your advantages of movement. It likes to trap you, ambush you and scare the living hell out of you by sticking Mancubi and Hell Knights behind every bloody door. DOOM likes to teleport enemies into cramped spaces and laughs when you panic-fire a rocket into them, baking your own face in the backblast. DOOM has a way of terrifying the player that modern shooters never could; it lets us see how strong we are, then it makes us weak. It lets us learn how to render enemy numbers meaningless, then it denies us those means.
What this DOES do, however, is make us thankful for the times we CAN exploit those tactics. After countless cramped, heart-stopping tunnel fights it feels wonderful to step into a vast, open courtyard full of enemies and say "Ha! Now you're all screwed!"
It's better than any set piece play-as-you-watch cinematic. It's more intense than any rail-shooting vehicle segment. It's leaps and bounds beyond the "Here's a God Mode gun, go nuts!" level. DOOM simply puts you into an arena against a massive horde of enemies, and lets you discover just how good you are.
4) DOOM is pure:
There's a story to DOOM. Here it is: You're a Space Marine. Your team is dead, killed by the legions of Hell that came pouring out of a portal on Mars, and now the only thing between them and ruling the Red Planet (or Earth, if you're playing the sequel) is you. Good luck with that.
Yes, we really are done with the story now. That's all there is. There's no plot developments during play, no ancilliary characters bleating about how much they miss their wife and children, no scientists to rescue, no tedious cutscenes about people we don't care about, no loud-mouth douchebag cunts who say "fuck" every other word and ruin the game at every opportunity, and best of all no FUCKING! ESCORT! MISSIONS! All of that can go hang as far as DOOM is concerned - there's nothing between you and the exit but a few keys, the occasional trap, some lava / toxic waste and legion upon legion of Hell's best bullet-catchers.
In this day and age, we need some of that purity; we need a game where the story is something that happens in the Intro sequence, and then perhaps during the End Credits. It would be nice, for once, to have an FPS that isn't trying to make me care about things I don't care about - yeah, I'm sure you're really proud of Rico's intricate backstory and his fucking tourettes, but I'm here to shoot people, so kindly get that cutscene out of my face!
Now I want to make it clear that not ALL games should be like this. There is definitely a place for story-driven, 2-weapon based, cover-hugging, real-is-brown FPS titles. However, just because you CAN do these things does not mean you SHOULD. A little back to our roots purity would not go amiss now and then.
Now if you'll excuse me, "Barrels of Fun" is waiting, and I'm not sure whether the 'fun' is going to be mine or the game's...
