Will : This was quite fun for me. Unlike Prez and Jamie who did not. Doom 3's narrow corridors aren't really made for three players either - but ammo and guns are at least limited by the mod to ensure it's not a complete pushover.
Monsters disintegrating into thin air while still walking towards you instead of keeling over and dying is another bugbear as well - the whole thing really does feel like a fan-made beta release.
Which it is. However, the best moment came when fighting against the guardian in the hell levels. He got confused and instead of smiting our gallant team, just sat there looking grumpy and a lot like the depressed cat that needs baffling in Monty Python's Confuse-a-Cat' sketch.
This obviously entailed lots of candid screenshot-takmg of us getting up close with the miffed dark lord of hell. Better than the usual tourist snaps anyway. Prez : As Will mentioned, hosting Last Man Standing is infinitely preferable to merely joining a game. From the other side of the fence, everyone appeared to be moving on roller skates and their guns inactive, despite the constant hell creature explosions.
The lack of gunfire cues made it hard to determine where best to put your own limited ammo supplies, although everyone seemed to be very susceptible to a good torch battering - especially team-mates. Also, a bug meant that the character models for teleporting bad guys would all be visible long before they activated, ruining most of the game's shocks and scares.
There was also an odd side effect with the hell guardian. Aside from remaining motionless, there were two of them. Which you don't see every day. Ultimately, it's an exercise in frustration. Pissing About Potential : Jumping out of the shadows to try and scare Prez was an amusing aside, especially as the game wasn't very good on that front.
Mostly though, nothing beats a good healthy torch fight should you find yourself on a deserted Mars base. The discovery that crouching and shooting a team-mate with the shotgun catapults them across the room also led to much hilarity and impromptu dumping in lava.
When I played Doom 31 got much what I expected: a shooter that wasn't particularly clever or mould-breaking, but one that was hugely atmospheric, very dark, full of technological whizz-bangs and a hell of a lot of fun. When I played Doom 3 multiplayer, however, I didn't.
Id Software the games company who broke my deathmatch virginity with such effusive grace back in the good old days of Quake and its map-designing friends at Splash Damage who were responsible for the excellent Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory have cooked the books slightly. Four players, slow pace, five maps, darkened nooks and crannies, a slew of references to former id glories and one or two interesting features per level - far distant from the Arena frag-fests of recent years and with a focus on compact, quality-controlled blasting rather than a huge number of inconsequential maps and features.
At first, as they say, it's all gravy. There's plenty of fun to be had, for example, flicking the switches in the Lights Out map, powering down the generator, pulling the shutters down on the windows and stalking around in the darkness.
Indeed, hiding in the shadows and blasting a pursuer as he hurtles past is the greatest pleasure that Doom 3 deathmatch affords. Elsewhere there's a welcome return to the hub-trap style of map-making with the skin-shredding Frag Chamber, a few well-placed Berserk modes hideous screaming included and some nice features you won't notice instantly - like the power-up in the bowels of the Tomiko Reactor.
After a while though, you hit a big bloodstained wall. Fun as the map gimmicks are, there's a finite amount of enjoyment that can be squeezed from them. You discover that you can join servers that are running with eight players, and that ups the ante somewhat, but before long it becomes painfully apparent that this is a hugely limited multiplayer package.
Over a LAN I'd say that this is a great game to stick on for an hour or so and shout abuse at each other, against faceless members of the internet community, but the fun ebbs away the more you play it. The future of Doom 3 multiplayer, however, does lie in the modding community. As I type all manner of tweaks are appeanng online offering 32 player insta-deathmatches and the like, and with an engine this nifty you can bank on some gems turning up one day or another. For now, though, you play it much as it was developed - and that's as a side thought.
It's fun for a while, but there are bigger, brighter and better things out there. It's not a total disaster, but it's still the most underwhelming multiplayer that we've seen attached to an id product. Dallas, Texas - the jewel of the Lone Star State. What a godforsaken hellhole. Never before have I been shipped to a bleaker, more soulless place to report on a games event and yes, that includes Slough and Milton Keynes. Like an antiquated videogame, the city is made of singlepolygon buildings, their mirrored veneers reflecting a sterile scene of deserted roads and too-neat hedges, the sidewalks occupied only by cops and the occasional blurry NPC -probably packing heat.
The sole distinguishing feature is the trademark Texan excess. Shopping malls are like small cities. Steaks are the size of your average domestic pet. In a way though, this is what we love about America. The more barren, nasty and crime-ridden a city is, the more thriving the corresponding subcultures usually are. Just look at Washington DC, murder capital of the US, and home to the nation's finest punk-rock scene and some of the finest bands ever created.
In Dallas there are no bands they're all in neighbouring Austin , but this bland metropolis has another, more relevant claim to fame: it's the world's undisputed capital of the first-person shooter. Ten-some odd years ago, to coin a Texanism, a revolution occurred in games that you may be familiar with. In Mesquite, 20 minutes from Dallas, a bunch of geeks got bored with the primary culture of incest, rodeos and meat drinks and created Wolfenstein 3D, the world's first true FPS. The genre has since held the PC gaming population in thrall for over 10 years, and its godfathers at id Software have remained at the centre of the scene throughout.
Other high-profile companies like 3D Realms, Ion Storm, Gearbox and Origin all have their roots in Dallas or nearby Austin, but only id Software creates a fan frenzy big enough to bring thousands of sweaty gamers to Texas every year, 40kg PCs on their backs, to join in a four-day blowout of gaming mayhem.
If you hadn't guessed, the event is QuakeCon, America s biggest LAN party, games convention and prize tournament; a by-the-fans, for-the-fans affair dedicated to the games of the id stable. The event once again took place in Dallas this August, continuing an eight-year tradition of free fragging, partying and sleeping on floors. It's unknown if anyone lasted the full 96 hours, though there were certainly a few freakish characters who were keen to try.
Numbers in the BYOC are estimated to have topped 2, at peak, the full logistical and hygienic considerations of which are impossible to calculate. Needless to say, the fact that the event coincided with the New York blackout did not escape the attention of worried-looking hotel staff. However, as a proud affirmation of geek culture, QuakeCon is unrivalled. Where else could one wear a T-shirt bearing the slogan Will Frag For Sex' and still hold one's head high?
Respect is key, and it's not just earned on the virtual battlefield. Case-modding is de rigueur, and if you don't have a neon light shining out the side of yours then you might as well go home. Extra points are given for doing away with the case altogether, to be replaced with a common industrial or laboratory item, ideally combined with a T-shirt that shows your commitment to the cause. Anything pre-millennium and you're a goddamned Jedi. But the real reason we were there was not to enjoy the delights of a 2,strong man-fest, but to play Doom 3 and collar the boys from id.
We managed both, even sneaking in a few hours playing Call Of Duty genius. The fruits of our labour can be found on the following pages, so saddle up, strap on some chaps and bathe in the 'adrenalinpumping atmosphere' of the hottest event on the Texan social calendar. There's No doubting that in terms of pre-release hyperbole, Doom III is currently the biggest game in development, something which has made id Software worried about overexposure.
So, to ensure the world wasn't swamped with Doom III material, id released a handful of screenshots with the official word that no more were going to be available until after the New Year. Ironically, a few days later an early version of the code was leaked onto the Internet and downloaded by just about everyone with a fast enough connection. The illegal alpha contained three levels and is the same demo that was shown off at May's E3.
You can wander around Doom's trademark pipe-infested corridors, play with a few of the weapons, shoot a few of the monsters that are scattered around and witness some of the physics and scripting that should lift Doom III above being just another shadowy corridor shooter, but of course it was designed specifically to show off key graphical features rather than be indicative of gameplay itself. As id's John Carmack himself now famously stated: "Making any judgements from a snapshot intended for a non-interactive demo is ill-advised.
Spooky, claustrophobic, spiked with scripted shock mechanisms, and generally looking - not to mention moving - better than pretty much anything that's gone before.
Bring it on. Gently Now, don't rupture anything, but let out that breath you've been holding for the last three years: Doom 3 is here and it's magnificently, hellishly great. Before I start up on how and why it's going to blow you away though, we need to spin back three weeks to when I was playing through the original incarnation of Doom in preparation for this review.
At that time, a quizzical young work-expenence lad was sitting to my left with a look of undisguised derision on his face. What do you mean it doesn't look scary? You weren't there! You weren't with us at the start! Didn't you just see those lights going out and those Those Imps! Get out of my sight! But how could he ever know? That ball of adrenalin that used to plunge into your diaphragm every time you opened a door, the spawn-twitch' that would kick in every time a light flickered, the suspicion that arose with every casually strewn key or weapon - it may look ropey by today's standards, but while Wolfenstein laid the foundations for first-person gaming.
Doom created the blueprint for everything that would follow in its giant cyber-demonic footprints. I was so riled by this kid's innocent id-bashing that I didn't stop shaking and muttering until about three days ago - because three days ago I started to play Doom 3. And I discovered that parts of it are going to eat his ignorant little soul. Fact: Doom 3 is the most polished game ever to be released on the PC. It's so well fabricated that you simply cannot see the seams. But despite the incredible graphical technology, sound effects that will thrill and amaze you, scripting that will chill your spine and the most beautifully animated monsters ever seen, this is a marvel that resolutely looks back to the past of PC gaming.
Doom 3 is id looking back to its roots and saying: What would we have made back then if we had access to the technology, skills and unlimited piles of cash we have now? So there's no stealth, no leaning round corners, no sniping and no inventory; no RPG elements, no pretend-clever enemy Al, no complicated, open-ended objectives, no alternate firing modes, no drivable vehicles and no mock realism.
Of course, there's story, characters, events and environments that have all the hallmarks of a great contemporary shooter. However, in terms of basic gameplay, the only extra keys added since Quake II are for getting out your torch and frantically jabbing at the sprint button. This is back to basics stuff, but they're basics that still work well. So then, plot. The UAC is a nasty global corporation that wields so much power that the boundaries of morality no longer act as a barrier to its machinations, with a wipe-clean sheen of rules, regulations, no-smoking areas and safety procedures to protect its image.
Its Mars base is an isolated outpost where the UAC's most brilliant - and most notorious - scientist Doctor Betruga can research whatever he pleases: be it teleportation, strange emanations coming from the depths of the facility or an intriguing mixture of both.
You are a raw marine employed by the UAC, and your first 15 minutes on the base sees you wandering around Freeman-style, gawking at the stunningly presented and realistically grimy military outpost, before being sent off on the trail of a missing scientist.
Unfortunately, Betruga has been dabbling in things he shouldn't, and once the game's roaming preamble comes to a close, guess what: all hell breaks loose. And yes - in the grand tradition of Doom reviews through the ages - we do mean literally. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
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