Somethingawful reviews Doom 3, achieves enlightment

[Jake]

Theres a review of Doom 3 over at SA and while it's mostly the usual, there are some good bits...

You know how all units in realtime strategy games always have one critical flaw? Like you can produce little motorcycles that zip around really quickly but never pack more firepower than a broken labelmaker, or you can pump out massive tanks which can destroy the entire Earth but are incapable of moving anywhere at all ever? This is what game designers like to call "balanced gameplay," which roughly translates to "you can have fun just as long as something's slightly irritating you," and I'm proud to announce this theory is often carried out into game production itself. The further technologically advanced a game becomes, the less of a plot and storyline it features, just to balance it out.

And...

In the near future, when I'm strapped to the electric chair and the sweaty, obese Alabamian warden asks me if I have any final words, I will proudly exclaim, "yes I may have murdered all those orphans the prosecuting attorney falsely claimed I murdered, but at least I never produced a first person shooter about killing spiders in a sewage processing plant."

Then everybody will thoughtfully glance at each other as the words slowly sink into their brains, and they will soon be overtaken by raw emotion when it dawns on them that I'm not the real enemy, I'm merely a victim of circumstances. The warden will still flip the switch and fry my brains out, mostly because this takes place in the bleak and tyrannical police state future that KMFDM so astutely predicted, but at least everybody will finally realize that the gaming industry shoulders some of the blame.

Here's a little message for you guys and gals coding the latest and greatest game about shooting with guns: we gamers don't have wet dreams about killing spiders. We don't talk about how awesome it would be to run around a waste processing station and either shut down or activate the processor which processes the waste processing; I'm not even sure who first decided that every game needs an obligatory sewer system level. When we think of our favorite video game moments, not a single one of them revolves around shooting a barrel which either catches fire or explodes. And as awesome you think the idea of "simultaneously spawning a bad guy in front of you the exact moment a bad guy spawns behind you" is, most of us generally don't agree.

Let me rehash that list for some of the more lazier developers out there, complete with an animated gif of a checkmark to let you know exactly how much I love animated gifs of checkmarks:

THINGS NOBODY WANTS TO SEE IN A FIRST PERSON SHOOTER:

- Spiders and the inevitable Spider Queen because if there are spiders that means there's gotta be a Spider Queen, am I right or am I right folks?

- Performing a seemingly never-ending series of menial janitorial tasks inside a gigantic filthy industrial complex.

- Hundreds of millions of barrels which inexplicably explode when touched, yet are located in every hallway and next to every computer everywhere. There are apparently a lot of futuristic workplace accidents in the future.

- Enemies that silently spawn behind you and attack before you even know they are there.

- The phrase "powered by Lithtech" on the box.

You might want to check out the rest of the review as well.

[Marek]

I fear that's what's going to be my opinion on Doom 3. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

[Salka]

To be honest, I'm not worried about any of that. I mean, okay. Doom 3 has no plot. But Doom never had a plot. Or if it did, I don't think it actually mattered much. The whole great thing about Doom was that you just got to blow things up and you didn't need a reason.

Not that that makes it alright for Doom 3 to have no plot... it just means I don't care.

[b0b]

Agreed.

People who bitch about Doom3 not having a plot should be flung into a waste processor.

iD don't do "plots". They do, urr, nice engines, umm, brown levels, umm, darkness and zombies and rockets.

These are all good things. Although I believe my Riddick review featured a mini-rant against the evils of crates/barrels/corridors etc..

Damn I'm so perceptive and like, ahead of the times.

Although Old Man Murray probably said it best with his Crate-Based Review System

[OftenK]

When we think of our favorite video game moments, not a single one of them revolves around shooting a barrel which either catches fire or explodes.

I would like to say, in the barrel's defense, that some of my favorite Armed and Dangerous moments do revolve around exploding barrels. The exploding barrels in Splinter Cell were cool too (the way you have to shoot a hole in the barrel, then shoot the oil required some quick sniper work). Those are the only games I think of that do the exploding-barrel thing well.

[Salka]

The barrels need no defence. One of my fondest memories of Doom, or Doom 2... is going in to a room filled entirely with barrels, and accidently pressing Spacebar.

Best. Explosion. On my 386. Ever.

Then came a lot of games with bigger and better explosions, and more crates and barrels, on faster machines, so it stopped being so cool to a lot of people, but not to me. I mean, Oni had thee most crates EVER, and there's a lot of explosions going on in, say, pretty much every game. But not one game since Doom has had designers with enough creative thinking to make an entire room full of pretty much nothing but barrels.

And the barrels were filled with petrol.

[Marek]

People who bitch about Doom3 not having a plot should be flung into a waste processor.

I would agree with you if Doom 3 did in fact not have a plot, no e-mails you need to read and computer screens you need to manipulate, no "modern atmospheric story game" pretentions. But it does. Based on all that I've heard (and my whopping 15 minutes of play time), it's not the pure Doom1/Painkiller style shoot-all-you-can-it-doesn't-matter gameplay. As Spaff says, it's like System Shock without the RPG.

I will now stop commenting on Doom 3 until I've actually properly played it. (Yeah, right.)