Checksum Arcanius

After work today, I picked up Shai, bought Doom 3 at Best Buy, went home, made and ate tacos (yummy), then installed and played Doom3, intermixed with writing some microcontroller code. The game is well done, very taxing on the computer hardware, and phenominally… dark. id still hasn’t figured out that there is more to a game than scary demons and cutting edge graphics. But the engine is pretty cool – the real time lighting effects and hot air distortion are the “coolest” effects. Unfortunately, the lighting doesn’t reflect off of mirrors (although there are mirrors), and the corpses dissolve away completely unneccesarily. The game tries hard to keep the tension turned up, but it should try harder to stop me from getting lost in its maze of rooms, or else I will get bored and stop playing (as I just did). id needs to learn how to lead the player on while still making them work, as in Half Life. I don’t see the game winning any awards outside of techincal merit.

Furthermore, for a game that has the nearly the exact same storyline as the original Doom, I was somewhat disappointed to find that the first mission wasn’t at all reminiscent of the original game. Sure, the rest of the game could be different, but everyone remembers (or at least I remember) the precise layout of e1m1 in doom. How cool would it be to have it start out that way. Instead, we got Quake 4 with more advanced lighting and more advanced scripting. As nice as these things are to ooh and aah over the first time you see thim, they don’t hold an audience for long.

Oh yeah, multiplayer sucks trash too, as does pretty much every multiplayer game outside of counterstrike. Oh well. Hopefully some more play time with surround sound enabled will help my opinion of this one some, because I did pay a pretty penny. Of course, I probaly would not have purchased it had HL2 come out, but that looks like its never going to happen, so I had to try a stop-gap. Maybe CS:CZ would have been a better purchase? Hmmm.

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