the first person shooter game thread (eew fps)

[Square King]

Bought Stalker and TF2 last night on Steam for a whopping $7.50, so I'll be into those two once I get them installed. Currently going through No One Lives Forever 2.

[Mortificator]

I played through Doom 3's expansion recently after hearing it was better than Doom 3, and it is, but not by enough to be worthwhile. The devs that id contracted this to obviously couldn't give Doom 3 what it really needed (i.e. throw out everything and start over), so they put a band-aid on its problems in the form of three new weapons:

1. The double shotty, the only firearm in the game that's genuinely fun to use.

2. The grabber, which can hurl stuff like HL2's gravity gun, but whose main convenience is that it can easily mop-up small enemies.

3. The artifact, powered by souls you can take from any dead body... I'd have thought a dead body would be the last place you'd look for a soul, but whatever. Activating the artifact places the player in "helltime" for about 15 seconds, during which your field of vision is reduced and hearing is muffled while you enjoy up to three benefits, depending on how many bosses you've beaten:
* After beating the first boss, helltime causes time to slow to a crawl for the enemies.
* After the second boss, helltime also grants a significant damage boost to your guns and an enormous one to your fists, enough to let you kill any non-boss enemy with a single punch.
* After the third boss, helltime also makes you invincible.

You'll have all three powers by the last third of the game, and with the level designers being generous enough to heap corpses in every area, you'll spend most of combat in a blurry godmode as you run up to enemies and punch them. Basically, the solution to Doom 3's lame gunfighting was to eliminate gunfighting as much as possible.

[Ed Oscuro]

DOOM III: Resurrection of Evil's failing, I thought, was that the endgame was terrible. That cavern had some pretty terrible mapping in it.

Helltime was an interesting idea but I think it's only used at a few points. Lame.

Right now I'm kind of enjoying Redneck Rampage Rides Again (yeah, I didn't bother finishing Route 66 after it crashed), although it continues to have the same maddening puzzles as before. The motorcycle with mounted machine guns is tough to steer with a mouse, but it works. Seems better than Shadow Warrior's vehicles. On the whole I'm not sad I gave these games a pass back in the day. Huge maps; not so many enemies but it's nice to jog around a bit. Seems to be the biggest I've seen in the Build engine yet.

[dave4shmups]

What is the difference between Ultimate Doom and Final Doom, in terms of variations on the original game??

Also, I've heard that both Powerslave and Alien Trilogy run better on the Sega Saturn then they do on the PS1-is this true?

[Acid King]

What is the difference between Ultimate Doom and Final Doom, in terms of variations on the original game??

Ultimate Doom is Doom 1 with a fourth episode. Final Doom is all new levels.

[dave4shmups]

What is the difference between Ultimate Doom and Final Doom, in terms of variations on the original game??

Ultimate Doom is Doom 1 with a fourth episode. Final Doom is all new levels.

Coolness, thanks!! I loved Doom 3, but then I love id's FPS games in general. I just got the Collector's edition of Doom 3, which has Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 on it!

When I get a 360, I'd love to pick up Quake 4-I watched GameSpot's video review of the game, and the slowdown doesn't look bad at all in the 360 port, and, AFIK, it only occurs in one part of the game.

Borderlands just looks wicked!!

[Ed Oscuro]

When I tried the Final DOOM levels a few years ago I thought they were junk...but don't let me spoil that

[saucykobold]

I think it's worth pointing out that Final Doom consists of two different level sets. TNT: Evilution is forgettable, but Plutonia is quite good (imo).

[nem]

When I get a 360, I'd love to pick up Quake 4-I watched GameSpot's video review of the game, and the slowdown doesn't look bad at all in the 360 port, and, AFIK, it only occurs in one part of the game.

It's not the slowdown, but the terrible frame rate it chugs along constantly (sub 25). It's like playing some first gen PS1 game. I couldn't play it

Borderlands is really fun. I can see how it would be extremely samey when played alone, the story sucks and NPC characters are about as interesting as cardboard. However, yay for multiplayer, competing for loot in co-op makes you forget about such trivial matters. It's all about the loot

[Square King]

I'm most of the way through Quake 4 on 360 and haven't noticed any slowdown at all. :shrug:

[Thunder Force]

I'm most of the way through Quake 4 on 360 and haven't noticed any slowdown at all. :shrug:

Are you playing on an SD TV? I seem to recall the port runs well in SD, but not in HD.

[Ed Oscuro]

Redneck Rampage Ride Again done. Not deleted because I might load up some Route 66 maps later and shoot through them.

I wanted to work on Soldier of Fortune Platinum - the version with extra maps - because I've only played the sequel. Problem: It crashes on my XP box.

Solution: Get an older computer running. I looked around and saw a 1.1 GHz Athlon machine (probably a no-go, has bad RAM). Instead of finding the old Compaq with PCI-only video (yucky) I noticed my dual Pentium 3 (550MHz Slot 1 format) machine.

I noticed it had a graphics card in it - I thought that I had pulled a quad head PCI video card with a whoppin' 4MB RAM out of this one years ago (I possibly did). Yet there was a video card already in it - and thankfully I noticed it was in the AGP slot. I've got a GeForce 4 TI (4200 I think) that will fit in there - but what was this huge thing that was already in it?

Jeezus! An Oxygen GMX! This thing retailed for $2299 ten years ago. It's not so expensive nowadays (not even compared to where they were some years ago when I went looking on the 'Bay) but it may be amusing to try to play Soldier of Fortune with this card. I'll probably just stick in the GeForce 4, however, since the 96MB of RAM in the Oxygen GMX is split into 16MB of VRAM, and 80MB of EDO. It's meant to keep a lot of data on the card to speed up rendering over hard drive accesses, I'd guess.

Now to install a hard drive and a new copy of Windows on this machine.

[dave4shmups]

What do you guys think of GoldenEye: Rogue Agent? I don't expect a sequel to the N64 Goldeneye, but the gameplay looks pretty solid, and really fun.

[Acid King]

I wanted to work on Soldier of Fortune Platinum - the version with extra maps - because I've only played the sequel. Problem: It crashes on my XP box.

Soldier of Fortune is awesome, one of my all time favorites. It's fast, it's got totally vicious over the top violence, and guns that actually have some heft to them and are fun to use. That's a game I loved to crank the difficulty on and just fuck up horde after horde of enemies in. Multiplayer was a lot of fun too.

[dave4shmups]

I LOVE Ultimate Doom! I mean, I love id's FPS's in general, but this is definitely the best FPS I've ever played! I don't mind a big story, but ultimately I just want to blast enemies. This game rocks!

That's what I liked, in addition to the great sense of humor, about Serious Sam on the XBOX-not much of a serious story, just fun mindless shooting! I'd like to pick up the second one. I've seen screen shots of Serious Sam HD, but I really wish the developers would do an entirely new game.

[Marc]

I'm playing Doom on the iPod Touch. I'm not 100% comfortable with any of the control methods on offer yet, but fuck, it's Doom. On the shitter. With tilting to strafe. it also demonstrates that a simple FPS and a dumb FPS are different beats entirely.

[dave4shmups]

I'm playing Doom on the iPod Touch. I'm not 100% comfortable with any of the control methods on offer yet, but fuck, it's Doom. On the shitter. With tilting to strafe. it also demonstrates that a simple FPS and a dumb FPS are different beats entirely.

Ha, nice! Speaking of older FPS games, what's the best FPS Duke Nukem, and on which console? Same for Wolfenstein 3D, XBL and PSN notwithstanding. I know Wolfenstein 3D got ports on both the 3DO and the Jaguar, although I don't know which one is better. (The GBA port is HORRIBLE!) I can't believe that it never saw a release on the PS1.

[Mortificator]

The only Duke FPS is Duke Nukem 3D (add-ons notwithstanding), and the best way to play that is using the PC version with the high-res pack. It probably works with the shareware episode if you want to just try it out.

[dave4shmups]

The only Duke FPS is Duke Nukem 3D (add-ons notwithstanding), and the best way to play that is using the PC version with the high-res pack. It probably works with the shareware episode if you want to just try it out.

Ok, thanks! I think it's on the Saturn. I read IGN's old review of Duke Nukem 64, and while they gave it a good overall rating, they castigated Nintendo for censoring stuff like strippers.

[Ed Oscuro]

What do you guys think of GoldenEye: Rogue Agent? I don't expect a sequel to the N64 Goldeneye, but the gameplay looks pretty solid, and really fun.

I heard it's not Goldeneye. Then again, Rogue Agent and From Russia With Love aren't the N64 version of The World is Not Enough (blah) or Nightfire (somewhat less blah but still not close to Goldeneye). That's a gap in my FPS knowledge, unfortunately.

I wanted to work on Soldier of Fortune Platinum - the version with extra maps - because I've only played the sequel. Problem: It crashes on my XP box.

Soldier of Fortune is awesome, one of my all time favorites. It's fast, it's got totally vicious over the top violence, and guns that actually have some heft to them and are fun to use. That's a game I loved to crank the difficulty on and just fuck up horde after horde of enemies in. Multiplayer was a lot of fun too.

Well this is hilarious

The first box I was looking at: Dual Pentium II or possibly III (I recall it being sold as a III, but somewhere on the board I read II, maybe it just supports it) but in any case I rediscovered that SMP isn't supported in Windows 98, which was the OS I was shooting for. No sound so I had to break a '99 soundcard out of some box or another. The GeForce 4 video wouldn't show up. I don't know what the deal is here, maybe it's set up for a weird CAD video + 4 head video card setup.

Next box: Compaq Presario 5461. AMD K6-2. It only has PCI video and the only PCI video card I have about is a Voodoo 3 2000. As predicted, it runs like shit (same story as Aliens vs. Predator, which I briefly pulled out of storage one or two years ago).

Next box: Compaq Presario 5000NX. Athlon 1.1 GHz. Used RAM from the rendering (dual) machine, had the thing throw errors at me (until you go back into the BIOS, just a dumb chore; newer motherboard generally only beep memory errors at you if the amount of RAM in a box is less than before), then had it not detect the hard drive. Joy.

I think what I'd love to do is take a baseball bat to the super-shitty Compaq boxes after I take the parts out. Back in the day, having a Proliant, I never really understood where all the hate for Compaqs was coming for; I always kind of liked the red logo. It's just that I never had to actually fight one to get a hard drive out. On the 5000NX, as on other machines, the hard drive came from right under the floppy drive. On the NX there's a little box thing that fits in the end of this bay that slides out through the front (you have to take the iMac-style seethrough bubble plastic off to see how it goes out; I was tugging from inside the case for a while before I tried this), and then you discover that there's no way the hard drive actually fits in this thing. It's too small to be a caddy - the outer dimensions are the same as the hard drive. There's a lip on it which sort of grabs the bottom of the drive, and some little metal nubs instead of screws to grab the hard drive (I guess), but if you assemble that and slide it into the computer, the back of the drive (connector end) will hit your heatsink, which you've already taken the fan off of so you could get the hard drive in from the other direction (from inside the case; that won't work because of the "helpful" hard drive caddy prongs - instead of screws - that apparently hold the drive in place) but they don't seem to line up with the holes on the drives in any meaningful fashion). In the end, I had to use a screwdriver to pry little metal prongs from the bottom of the hard drive bay out of the way which were catching on the back of the hard drive so I could slide the whole thing out and just put the drive in.

Get what I'm saying? It's madness, that's what it is.
The hard drive is not as snug as I might have liked, but probably poses no problem so long as I don't forget to keep it level and not let the drive slide out of place and out of the computer or fall onto the motherboard, graphics card, or other components I would like to keep.

Of course, the biggest challenge right now is getting the thing to detect in the first place. It had a bad copy of XP loaded on, so it might not give up to Win98 without a fight.

[Mortificator]

That sucks, Ed. I looked around a little nd it doesn't seem there's a reliable solution to getting SoF working on XP (or Vista or Win 7). But you probably already looked into that before messing around with older machines.

I read IGN's old review of Duke Nukem 64, and while they gave it a good overall rating, they castigated Nintendo for censoring stuff like strippers.

The four-player Dukematches were fun back in the day, when everyone was tired of GoldenEye.

[dave4shmups]

That sucks, Ed. I looked around a little nd it doesn't seem there's a reliable solution to getting SoF working on XP (or Vista or Win 7). But you probably already looked into that before messing around with older machines.

I read IGN's old review of Duke Nukem 64, and while they gave it a good overall rating, they castigated Nintendo for censoring stuff like strippers.

The four-player Dukematches were fun back in the day, when everyone was tired of GoldenEye.

Yeah, I remember the four-player Goldeneye matches back in college; man I stunk! But it was fun to play with friends! Once I finally got to play the single-player campaign, that's what got me into FPS games.

[Ed Oscuro]

That sucks, Ed. I looked around a little nd it doesn't seem there's a reliable solution to getting SoF working on XP (or Vista or Win 7). But you probably already looked into that before messing around with older machines.

I'm used to not being able to play my games, anyway Consoles make it too easy.

I've tried two versions of SoF so far, including one called the "Portable Edition" which is basically an installed version. Both crashed the same way. I've had some system instability lately so I'll likely be dumping my files to a hard drive and doing a clean install - that might clear this up.

[dave4shmups]

That sucks, Ed. I looked around a little nd it doesn't seem there's a reliable solution to getting SoF working on XP (or Vista or Win 7). But you probably already looked into that before messing around with older machines.

I'm used to not being able to play my games, anyway Consoles make it too easy.

I've tried two versions of SoF so far, including one called the "Portable Edition" which is basically an installed version. Both crashed the same way. I've had some system instability lately so I'll likely be dumping my files to a hard drive and doing a clean install - that might clear this up.

Do you have a Dreamcast? AFIK, the original Soldier of Fortune game got a pretty exact port on that console.

[Acid King]

Do you have a Dreamcast? AFIK, the original Soldier of Fortune game got a pretty exact port on that console.

I forgot about the dreamcast port. The Dreamcast version is pretty good in terms of graphics and gameplay, plus I think you can use the mouse, but the loading is terrible and really interrupts the game and there's no multiplayer... not that there are many people playing nowadays. The PC version is much better.

[Ed Oscuro]

If I wanted to play the DC version I'd just put the Voodoo 3 2000 back in and turn off a bunch of features.

Anyway, I'll see if a reformat doesn't clear things up; it may well do it.

[sjewkestheloon]

Yup, Borderlands is crazy fun. Kind of old school with the way that it constantly spawns and respawns enemies in progressively harder variations. I went hunting Skags last night and ended up facing off against Bad Ass Skags, something I wasn't prepared for...

I think you'd dig the twitch fun Ed, but not sure if you're into the RPG side? The skill choices show a lot of potential playstyles.

[Thunder Force]

Yup, Borderlands is crazy fun. Kind of old school with the way that it constantly spawns and respawns enemies in progressively harder variations.

Borderlands is pretty interesting, but I've been seeing it as more representative of modern game design trends, from top to bottom. It feels like a "greatest hits" of contemporary game development, throwing together a bunch of modern designs that are proven to be popular (e.g. Halo shield recharge and control feel, Warcraft pretty much everything, and dashes of PSO and Fallout 3), which results in a nice accessible mashup action/rpg game, but not something that feels old school to me at all, particularly in its pacing.

On-topic, I've been doing some rare online gaming lately, testing out the megaton release Modern Warfare 2. And other than extreme lack of variety in the free-for-all maps (surely they want to sell you more later...), it's been a polished twitch-fps online that demands razor-sharp reaction times rather than tedious memorization, has great responsive controls, and lots of weapon variety; a real white-knuckle experience sometimes - like playing soldier as a kid x 1000. Here's a hint for anyone who hasn't caught on to this yet: playing this game online with 5.1 audio is like a free perk for your character, the soundscape in MW2 is so perfectly implemented you can almost play it with your eyes closed.

[gameoverDude]

You'll have all three powers by the last third of the game, and with the level designers being generous enough to heap corpses in every area, you'll spend most of combat in a blurry godmode as you run up to enemies and punch them. Basically, the solution to Doom 3's lame gunfighting was to eliminate gunfighting as much as possible.

Sad but true. Doom 3 becomes even less like real Doom than it already is.

Right now I'm on level 19 of Doom 64 playing on the "I Own Doom!" setting. This is more fun than Doom 3, with shitloads of demons to blast back to Hell. IMO, Doom 64 is much closer to the game Doom 3 should have been. Playing Doom 3 after playing any of the others is like playing SNES Final Fight after the arcade version. I missed the heavy amount of combat found in 1/2/Final/64. Grab a key and end up surrounded by six Barons of Hell? Not in Doom 3.

I had SoF on the DC, but I remember it being a little choppy and having to load in the middle of stages. It reeked of a sloppy port. At least the graphics were close if not exact, maybe with a drop in texture quality. Too bad Raven didn't do the port theirselves or keep a closer rein on it.

[Damocles]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFWlK7kj ... r_embedded

Gotta love the first line. This actually makes me sad since I just remembered I have a 100% Serious clear on the HD of my X-Box 1. God I love that game.

If nothing else this should fix those loooooooooooooooooooooooooong load times.