Tuesday, August 10, 2004
When a boom stick comes in handy
Doom 3 is almost the scariest games ever made. It's graphics are frightingly realistic. The lighting itself is almost on par with Thief 3, so any shadow you see is a potential threat (under Doom 3 law, any shadow WILL contain an idle zombie. With 5.1 speakers, you can hear the murmurs of the dead and the demons as they sneak up behind you in the dark. Only the report of your single-barreled shotgun can answer the evil that awaits you.
However, despite being a wildly fun game, full of some of the best man vs demon firefights seen in ages, despite manages to go SUPRISE every 2 minutes, despite having horrible horrible creatures such as the half-baby half giant flies you have to deal with, or the upsidedown heads with spider-legs, despite the great physics engine, the crystal clear textures, despite this all, Doom 3 is not the scariest game ever made. It's one of the best single player first-person-shooters ever made, but this only means it shares a basket with Half-life, Thief, Unreal, Far Cry, and the scariest game ever made, System Shock 2.
Doom 3 can do dread all right. There are times I don't feel like going on. But them I remember I'm a one-man-tank, and so I rush through a hallway until I have half the demon army chasing me, I hide in a corner, and I dispatch them as I come around the corner. I almost die, but I never do. I always fine enough ammo or health to save myself.
System Shock 2, which not as perfect as Doom in the SUPRISE department, managed to instill this wonderful sense of dread that still has me scarred. You were not a fighting machine. You were fairly weak, and not only were you always short on ammo, but there was always a chance your gun could jam, or flat out fall to pieces. Your enemies didn't jump out at you, they hunted you slowly through the dark spaceship corridors, calling you to come out to them. Your heard metal feet clickity-clacking across the cold floors, coming for you. Your enemies left messages for you. You found audio logs of people having their guts torn out. You were truly alone.
Doom 3 is like a mish-mash of Doom, Half-life, and System Shock 2. Its action it gets from Doom. Your fights are fast-paced, full of strafing and firing and shouting, "Die motherfucker die!" as you blow to pieces that demon that scared you so badly. It's set-up is Half-life to the extreme. HL showed us how wonderful scripted scenes could be, but Doom 3 is pretty much one big scripted scene. Almost every enemy appears because you triggered it. Sometimes you'll be walking, and the game will open a magical door in a wall just so a zombie can get you from behind, or demons will just randomly teleport in. It's a little too old school. The game's atmosphere/setting is taken from System Shock 2. The Mars base you are trapped on feels very much like the Von Brauhn, full of dark corridors and lots of computer screens with detailed numbers on them. Your objectives are "fix this part of the ship" just as often as they are "find the key for the door." Doom 3 is certainly the prettier of the pair.
But don't get me wrong, Doom 3 is as good a game as Far Cry, even if it is a different game in every way, and is well worth your time, if you have the rig to run it, that is. I barely do.
