the first person shooter game thread (eew fps)

[BIL]

I think I just had the BDOOM equivalent of that dumbass plastic bag scene from some movie, except this time our protagonist is the little skull fragment that could! edit: here's a evocative song to complete the experience, pls play it while viewing. Thanks!



It motored about bouncing off walls with impressive phyzics and surveying the horrific carnage of my bonerized E2M2, eventually disappearing around a corner where I'm sure it had many further adventures. The most benign of BDOOM's extant issues for sure. A helluva lot less bothersome than v18's decapitated Baron head landmines.

[Ed Oscuro]

decapitated Baron head landmines.

It sounds like we need an entire thread for Instant Death Excitement in FPSes!

[BIL]

You know what's funny is, stepping on a roving bone chip would presumably be more painful than a big meaty manbearpig head. Then again, those horns!

[Ed Oscuro]

Hey, Blood fans: I just heard about an up-to-the-minute DosBox packaged with a bunch of extra Blood content, with new features for making the game run better than before. Thousands of new maps. Not sure if I can directly link it but I could give some ideas about how to get the new stuff.

[BIL]

I'm currently hopelessly addicted to Doombuildering The Shores of Hell, but that's definitely something to look up when I'm out of rehab!



above: Lost Soul can only scream in horror at this world gone mad

[drauch]

Do you have a different texture pack for the guns I take it? Haven't looked into it myself and I'm lazy, but I'm intrigued! But still lazy.

[BIL]

I was using the creator-endorsed "enhanced" v19 that adds a few new weapon sprites, makes ammo inventory limits more generous, and most importantly of all... reinstates the killer updated Wolfenstein SS from v18. I have an out of bounds chamber full of the fuckers rigged up so that when a certain linedef is crossed, E2M2 goes all 1942. ^_~

[drauch]

Ah, excellent! Don't know what was shoved up my ass that didn't make me get on v.19a, because my life has been changed. I'd been using just regular ol' v19 from the get go, missing out on all that killer grenade launcher action! The sound, the satisfaction--I almost came my Doom panties!

[Edmond Dantes]

You have Doom panties?

I knew they made Power Rangers underwear but...

[Ed Oscuro]

I messed around a bit with Guncaster, a "Brutal DOOM"-ish mod for Heretic. It unbalances the game in multiple ways (especially if you use the changelevel console command to move across episodes, instead of starting fresh) and it's a bit too easy to get suckered into playing the maps too quickly / boringly by just abusing the magic. Not sure the guns work as well as the original weapons, but overall I'm thinking "man, gameplay hasn't really aged well in this one." Was a pretty quick playthrough (just the first three episodes - 4 and 5, post-D'Sparil, might have some improved work in them, but they don't seem to be heading for anything as the big bad is already gone).

HL2 modding scene seems kinda dead as far as map packs go - tried out the Station51 mod (for Episode 2) from 2012 (updated version in 2013) and it was really hum-drum. The most aggravating thing is that the guy spent 2 years working on it. Holy cow. There's another game that has a difficult-to-work with weapon set, IMO - or at least it is if you insist that all maps should only have the boring shotgun / smg / occasional pulse rifle refils, fighting enemies 50/50 close and far ranges (that weapon selection doesn't work for far ranges very well). It attempts to use most of the HL2 goodies - hopper mines, airboat, two aerial fights - but in each case the execution is worse than the original, unfortunately. Not really worth it for anybody but HL2 engine superfans (doubtful there are any around here).

Also, a technical note - I looked around a bit here and there on fps_max (a Source engine setting) and also v_sync and frames to render ahead (a setting that many people discovered of necessity back when TES Oblivion was released, but which has been removed from most drivers packages since, certainly from nVidia ones). Depending on what you read / who you ask, the Source engine seems to have mostly decoupled engine / rendering pipelines, so that advice for keeping fps_max at 300 (or even increasing it) with raw input selected for the best mouse movement seems wrong. I can't say I was totally pleased with control at fps_max 61 and v_synced, but it was much better than I was expecting for v_sync, and some of the nastiness appears down to unoptimized mouse movement / leaving the motion blur option enabled / not looking at max frames to render ahead settings.

I can't find much about prerendered frames (aka "max frames to render ahead") aside from a rather unnerving multi-year thread on the GeForce Forums where somebody has presented evidence about the behavior of old drivers with the settings 0 and 1 prerender frames, which so far hasn't been taken up. However, from what I can tell frames to render ahead seems not to offer much of a bottleneck or lag source even on low-FPS displays, and I'd guess it offers a better value if using variable rate displays.

[Jonathan Ingram]

A heads-up for whoever's interested in old-school FPS action on the go: Strife has been ported to the PSP and, by extension, its sibling Vita. It's only been out for a day, so a few bugs remain here and there which will hopefully be ironed out in subsequent revisions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0etC_1KARE

Where to get:
http://wololo.net/talk/viewtopic.php?p=358095

[Obiwanshinobi]

Any hi-res textures pack for the original Unreal Tournament anybody here would recommend? I don't usually care for those, but since UT won't run at any more than 60 fps on my PC (not sure why since the screen refresh rate is locked at 75 Hz), I can as well put extra power into textures.

[Edmond Dantes]

Oh hey, I don't know how many of you watch Ancient DOS Games, but that show recently reviewed Blood.

linkie dinkie

This isn't the first FPS he's done either, as in the past he's also reviewed Wolf3D, Doom 1 and 2, Duke Nukem 3D, and just last week did Nightmare 3D, and that's just all the ones I know off the top of my head. His reviews tend to be more documentary and focused on facts and not so much trying to be funny, since he's not very good at it.

Also my name was in the credits of the Nightmare 3D episode because I guessed the next review correctly ^__^

[Obiwanshinobi]

Whew, Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death (PC) keeps giving. Look, I can understand how the reviewers, supposed to play MOST first person shooters of that vintage, had taken it all out on Judge Dredd at the time, BUT:
a) the game engine is freaking nuts for its time. The sorta-rag-doll effect (if it works the same on all three consoles, I tip my hat to the makers), the rain effect (best in PC/multiplatform games prior to Cold Fear; although MGS2 looked even better on PS2 and CERTAIN PC hardware with CERTAIN patch, Dredd vs Death looks gorgeous straight out of box).
b) The game just doesn't do anything terribly wrong. "Mediocrity" some will say, but I suspect people most playing their most cherished games of the genre have their share of beef with them. Well, JvsD has yet to get on my nerves.
c) Did I mention the gore? Here I was thinking ultra violence in games doesn't do it for me anymore, but I must say with DISABLED auto-aim (enabled by default; switch it off whenever you install the game), headshots are mighty satisfying. Yes, it its a drunk post. If any game of its time and age comes near in this regard, it would be AvsP2 (where I read each and every Xenomorph can be dismemberd into 32 pieces, count 'em all).
d) Sheer artistry of it all. Surely taken straight out of the comic book, but here you can explore it in 3D (and high resolutions do it justice).

The flaw(s)? Well, it's begging for just a few sprinklings of brilliance that are nowhere to be found. The kind of which elevated XIII from "okay" level to "exquisite now and then".

[Ed Oscuro]

That sounds really interesting - thanks, I'll go ahead and check it out. The one thing that stuck with me from one of the old reviews is a complaint that "they dropped the Z-bomb too early" (zombies!) Kind of funny when you consider that this was before the zombie game genre really exploded into retail (of course there were plenty of zombie-based multiplayer shooters before then, like "good old" Zombie Panic!

Has anybody gotten any experience with Christopher Brookmyre's Bedlam yet? It's working off an idea I've been wanting to see in a game for a long while now. Link:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/261490/

Also, let me say that Orion: Prelude (which used to go by the much less generic and more accurate title DINO BEATDOWN) is one of the best dollars you'll ever spend. It won't turn your life completely upside down, but you should at least get a dollar's worth of fun out of it. If you do play it, and want to make progress quickly, look at the Prehistoric custom difficulty level.

[coturnixx]

I found Judge Dredd Vs Death quite enjoyable, nothing too spectacular but more than decent. Frankly being Rebellion i expected much worse. However the graphic design is quite good, and one of my most satisfaying FPS memories is putting handcuffs on an army of kneeling goons that i had disarmed with precise shots to their hands. The first part of the game is certainly terrific.

However it deflates quite a bit once zombies and vampires enter into the fray (those you can´t handcuff ) and then the game ends maybe a bit too soon. Wouldn´t mind a sequel that spared the supernatural thingies and focused on Megacity One gangs.

Overall worth a try, and there are lots of worse games, some of them extremely popular.

[Obiwanshinobi]

The other week, this retrospective said:

Rebellion has always demonstrated a peculiar talent for portraying violence in an almost hypnotic fashion, more recently witnessed in its Sniper Elite games.

So true...

That being said, I like the vampires in Dredd vs Death. Although their AI keeps repeating some wannabe-Halo pattern (one of many "me too!" traits here), it works for me. It was never going to be Halo anyway, neither did it really try to.

Boy, has Shadow Warrior actually got remade? What's next, Heart of Darkness HD?

P.S. Some of those Arcade missions of DvsD get pretty intense ( and - again - I doubt any other fps for PC had anything quite like it).

[Ed Oscuro]

I spent a couple hours with Dredd vs. Death across multiple play sessions.

Couple notes on the engine: I like the skyboxes quite a bit (and there's also some large polygonal buildings in many places to help mesh the background with the foreground). There's nice handling of weather effects; by the third level, it's raining; the mist clouds and rain are spawned pretty convincingly just beyond building overhangs. Fire looks alright, but AI characters don't understand what it is. Detail textures are oppresively omnipresent. Gotta like the semi-deformed skatepunk style cartoons in official advertisements; these contribute a fair amount of atmosphere, though I'm not sure it's anywhere near any 2000AD style. Other detail is a mixed bag - some areas are pretty featureless, and NPCs are a mixed bag as well. Some look great up close, while others look like clowns (almost literally - I like that detail of the poop stain on the unicycle-assisted fatties though). The silhouettes and animations don't really impress here. Vampires running while on fire look and sound a lot like something out of old Aliens vs. Predator. Overall, the engine and effects on display sacrifice a lot of detail for the sake of scale, but Serious Sam did it pretty well a couple years earlier. Finally, a big annoyance: V-Sync is locked on. It doesn't bother me much while playing, but it makes Hard difficulty even harder, and makes an instant-kill bot deathmatch well nigh impossible.

First thing I did was the arena. Cute but not a lot to it - after unlocking a couple more later, the third is more difficult but also more of the same (run outside onto one of the strips and camp spawns). The Block War is different - quite difficult and I've only been able to get Senior Judge on that one.

I liked the introductory level - not only do you get a good view of Megacity One's view of justice (the price is freedom!) but you also quickly decide to prioritize keeping alive and not shooting civilians over niceties like saving them or cuffing everybody in the middle of a hail of bullets. The disarm feature works fairly well, though many NPCs just stubbornly insist on resisting, and when Dredd is right next to them they often freeze up, which breaks the realism considerably (you want to push them down yourself, but there's no way to do this).

What's up with all the Red Bull promo, anyway?

Hoping against hope there's an air surfing level in here somewhere.

[soprano1]

Need an opinion: Quake or Quake II? Will need to run on those special engines, darkplaces and kmquake2. Thanks.

[Ed Oscuro]

Totally different games, depends on what you like.

I think there's better mod and especially expansion content for Quake 1, and its base game is better for me too. QII is alright but even at the time its collection of baddies seemed distinctly juvenile to me. They might not get hung up on doorframes and stairs like the slimes and fiends, but they also aren't very interesting.

[soprano1]

Totally different games, depends on what you like.

I think there's better mod and especially expansion content for Quake 1, and its base game is better for me too. QII is alright but even at the time its collection of baddies seemed distinctly juvenile to me. They might not get hung up on doorframes and stairs like the slimes and fiends, but they also aren't very interesting.

Quake's enemies look a little TOO blocky, though. Can that be a bit improved?

[Pretas]

Quake 1 is harder and will last you longer, but you need to have the patience for the sprawling, open-ended sort of level design that characterizes classic Doom. Quake II has a handful of areas where finding the method to progress is confusing, but it's much more linear and guided overall, with all the maps linked together into a single cohesive world instead of being split up and compartmentalized between four distinct episodes. It directly paved the way for increasingly narrative-driven and linear FPS games like Half-Life, which uses the same engine.

As was mentioned, Q2's bestiary is rather unimaginative and dull in comparison, and enemies don't put up nearly as much of a fight as in the first game. The heavy walking mechs are a joke when you realize that every explosive hit stuns them for a full second, and once you get the rail gun everything can be safely sniped from afar for huge damage. It's also much easier to amass a huge stockpile of weapons and ammo, without death resets or episode ends to wipe your slate clean.

I have not played the official single-player expansions of either Q1 or Q2, but they weren't made by Id. Q1's graphics don't hold up well in source ports that try to modernize the game as much as possible, but are gorgeous in vintage low-res pixel soup. I recommend Engoo, which is the Q1 equivalent of Chocolate Doom.

[Mortificator]

I like the look of DirectQ, but it had an occasional graphical glitch, last I played, as well as a game-breaking one: an enemy getting hit by a lightning trap will cause a crash. This only caused a problem in one of Scourge of Armagon's maps, but the engine was nice enough to autosave, and by suicidally flinging myself at the Shamblers in the area I was able to kill them before they could walk into it.

Speaking of Scourge, this first expansion is a significant improvement to the original game, and probably the Quake-related title I'd most recommend. You wouldn't miss much by skipping straight to it either, I mean, Quake has even less story than Doom.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I read Half-Life uses the (modified) first Quake engine.
QII engine shows in Heretic II, Kingpin, Anachronox...

[soprano1]

To everyone who replied to me, thank you.
Forgot to ask, is KMQuake II a good source engine? What about the mission packs? Thanks.

[Ed Oscuro]

I have been using the Darkplaces mod, which gives a nice mix of high resolution and graphics support (pretty sure you can turn off excessive filtering if you like the chunky look, wouldn't bother with low-res at this point unless you had an old PC to play it on for the sake of nostalgia, but like many other FPSes high resolution is beneficial) with pretty good compatibility.

Somebody has compiled a list of source ports with compatibility for various mods - it's not as fragmented as the DOOM engines but you also don't get the comprehensive list of flags found in something like zDOOM, either. Not sure how big a problem this is, though - I think Darkplaces runs most everything.

Things to watch out for in mod compatibility are jump height, handling of inertia, and possibly correct treatment of key flags or whatever is used to make progress. I think the only things I've ever noticed are related to jump height.

Speaking of Scourge, this first expansion is a significant improvement to the original game, and probably the Quake-related title I'd most recommend. You wouldn't miss much by skipping straight to it either, I mean, Quake has even less story than Doom.

The second one has a lot of neat stuff going on too.

There are some very memorable levels in the original level set, and if you're dead-set on some old-fashioned FPS fun, I would recommend prioritizing it above a lot of other things. Might as well build up to the climax, huh? Depends on how much time you want to invest in it.

The unofficial / fan-made mod scene is harder to pin down because there's a lot of stuff - some excellent, some terrible. Some of the most visible names:
Abyss of Pandemonium - pretty sure this is decent enough, though not quite on par with the official expansions.
Shrak - not sure I've played it, not a good rep.
Malice - looked cool and has some nice new bullet-points on paper, but not really good to play. Worth a look for the training level perhaps.
Nehahra - this fan-made expansion was machinima'd but I'd play it before wasting time on the video production. Overall, seems pretty decent, though I don't think the mapping was as enjoyable as the official expansions. Story was unnecessary, really.
X-Men - interesting for the weapon transitions and the can't-quite-figure-it-out Nightmare entrance in the hub map, but ugly and bad to play overall.
I have an empty folder for Quoth but I'm not sure I've messed around with it.
That other retail expansion I can't think of the name of - I've talked about it here - strange and slightly surreal maps with some puzzle elements - was alright to mess around with.

There's many other things besides - probably most of the gems are fan-made modifications made years after people figured out what they were doing.

[soprano1]

Thanks for the info, Ed. What of more recent games like Doom 3 BGF and Quake 4?

[Ed Oscuro]

Really don't care for them, actually. These later games focus more and more on fancy engine effects, resulting in even more constrained areas and less freedom of action. Jumping is still around but it's just a formality, for example. Weapons? Way too much emphasis on peashooters, especially the assault rifle, and reloading - and that's before the flashlight - basically anything to keep the player from actually doing; it tried to reimagine the iD formula as a suspense game, sort of. I started playing through DOOM III again last year (or so) but gave it up. Quake IV is more or less the same, except as a reboot-of-sorts of Quake II's story, now with DOOM III style enemies and jump scares, I felt.

One interesting thing about DOOM III is that they reportedly had a gravity gun working even before Half-Life 2 did. They later realized their mistake and one got put in (along with the double-barreled) for the rather half-baked "Resurrection of Evil" expansion, but we know which was the ascendant franchise there.

[soprano1]

Thanks again, Ed. Wish there was something similar to Brutal Doom for Quake and Quake II, that mod is amusing as hell, BIL knows for sure

[BIL]

Just popping in to +1 Scourge of Armagon, played it for the first time myself last year and was thoroughly entertained. I really like the original Quake set (Q1, Scourge & Dissolution). Reminds me of Virtua Fighter/Racing/Cop in its simple, fluid* and sharply responsive action.

WONT SOMEBODY PLS THINK OF THE CHILDRENZ



*with Interpolate Monster Movement activated via source port - vanilla engine's a bit chop chop. A quick check of my posts suggests I used DX8 ProQuake, but I just grabbed whatever worked and there's several to choose from at this point. That shit had the exploded monster chunks bouncing around my screen like House Of The Dead, marverous!