Unless you're playing Doom3 wherein RL damage is apparently distance relative.

Having been through the Doom source and guts a fair deal I can say you completely imagined this. 

Tef, pity there's no variation. Seemed like an obvious point to split the plot development.

Lun, hehee... I did say "apparently". Maybe I'm just a worse long shot than I thought. Regardless, except for the shotty at close range... the weps seemed to lack stopping power. 

i wish the cyberdemon was defeatable via normal weapons...
is there a way to h4x0r that? 

It's pretty easy, too. Open his .def file and set "finalBoss" to 0 - that makes him vulnerable again.

I just tested it and it works, but there's a problem. They never sorted out a normal monster death for him since he only dies cinematically. He ragdoll-dies when you kill him, which looks really weightless and fake, and his AF doesn't even look like it's finished. There's no death sound that plays either, and his body simply vanishes after it comes to rest.

All of that's fixable too, of course. 

I've played it. I've loved it.

What do you think, little man? 

I think I love you, czg. I think I love you. 

Too short. Vulgars look rubbish - like an Alien(TM) sprayed white with a joke-shop skull mask for a head. New/old-style lost souls have featureless grey surfaces with little apparent normalmap detail. Grabber a poor cousin to the gravity gun. Terrible script. Emails from scientists who have doctorates are littered with spelling errors. Very few PDAs have audio logs, no ingame videos I can recall, very few collectable ones which are all a bit half-assed compared to the ones in the original game. No chainsaw! Not enough variation from the original in the environments. Utterly flaccid final boss and ending. Wholesale copying of chunks of levels from the original game. Lead character looks plain wierd, main supporting character is a ginger[1]

On the plus side, the first artifact power is great (but the other two, while potent, are dull), slowing time and walking up to a stupid Vulgar with a double-barrelled shotgun is satisfying.

To be honest, it lacked polish and felt like playing a fairly good mod rather than an Official Licensed Product.

It comes on one single CD. One CD. That should give you an idea of how much content you're getting. Unless the CTF is absolutely the bestest CTF ever made for any game ever, I feel a bit ripped off...




[1] Sorry, I used to read Viz and I couldn't help it :) 

Vulgars look rubbish - like an Alien(TM) sprayed white with a joke-shop skull mask for a head.

I'm not sure that is any different from the existing Doom 3 monsters. 

In short I loved it. Here's a quick review:

New weapons - totally awesome, in fact now I don't think I could face playing the original Doom3 without my trusty Grabber and DBS. Both these weapons were spectacularly well done, and the Grabber especially added a whole new dimension to the combat.

The Artifact was cool - but I feel the same way about it as I do the Soul Cube - it justs feels a bit cheap and "cheaty". I'd rather do all my combat in the traditional way, like a real man - but this is a criticism that can be levelled at the original doom3 too.

New monsters - well, they looked awesome as always (they're still Kenneth Scott models, y'know) Vulgars were surprisingly hard to take down due to their skinny build - they had to basically be humping my leg before I could feed them the buckshot satisfactorily (although the DBS went some way towards alleviating that problem). I liked the way they teleported in with a blueish effect - that gave you a good warning.

The Bruisers were absolute bastards though, and I always ended up Artifacting their arses before I could really get an idea of what they could do.

Forgotten (Lost Souls) would have been pissy and annoying (like the original versions) were it not for the Grabber - that almost made fighting the little buggers fun! Same goes for the cherubs - the most annoying monsters in the game can now be dealt with in a rather amusing fashion. Shallow - I've no idea what you're on about with the Forgotten's skin - maybe you're playing it on a low detail setting or something - they looked great to me, much better than the original tortured female face design anyway.

Bosses - The Hunters were all extraordinarily well done and awesome to fight. The Betruger boss was not so fun, but I guess being the final boss he's supposed to be a bit of git.

Level design was spankingly good, exceeding the quality of the original game in many places - the various sewer and outdoor sections were particularly fun (and the envirosuit rocked bigtime). I felt the weakest levels (or rather the least fun) were the final two - Delta and Hell. The uber-fucked Delta level was just dark and annoying to play (like in the original game :P), whilst Hell was just bland, and offered nothing new over the glimpse of it we saw in the original. Oh, well at least the game up to that point was golden.

I really liked that there was less of an emphasis on cheap scares and monster closets in this XP. There were still some cheap moments (after all it can't stray too far from Doom 3 can it?) but overall, I found the gameplay to be fun rather than overly tense.

Cutscenes/Story/Presentation/Blah - the cutscenes were really nice, and I think I prefer this Doomguy to the original one, he just looks grittier. The animation/mocap in the cinematics was exceptional and the intro to the game was amazing. PDAs seemed just as abundant as the original, but they seemed to be mainly used for storage locker codes and security clearance, not loads of story stuff (which makes sense, as the story was pretty much told in Doom3).

Overall, I think this is a more-than-worthy follow up to Doom 3, correcting most of the gameplay criticisms I had with the original, adding some indespensible weapons to the arsenal, and making some devilishly good additions to the bestiary. 

The hunters/final boss:
Hunter #1 was kinda stupid, like playing pong.
Hunter #2 was awesome! Fuck yeah!
Hunter #3 kind sucked because I had no idea how to make him go into charge mode. I left that fight with 6 health!
Final boss was pure rockage. The way bosses used to be made. Attack patterns, attack modes, voulnerable periods, pull-trick-to-not-die periods. He totally rocked. The actual ending was suck tho.

I agree that delta labs was teh s4wk.
I do not agree that hell was teh s4wk. (Although, the 9 BoH's + 500 Mancubii arena was kinda hard if you didn't have a full stock of souls when you went in.) 

Kinn, are you being sarcastic? Honestly, are you?

That's not a review, that's... that's marketing. 

I almost had my credit card out ready to order the expansion after reading your review! ;)

not loads of story stuff (which makes sense, as the story was pretty much told in Doom3).

You can ALWAYS expand a story to encompass new material, unless your name is Chris Carter. 

Mulder and Scully investigate a PICK ONE:
man-eating aberration of nature
alien abduction
government cover-up
mulder's sister Samantha who we swear is the real Samantha in this episode and not more alien clone bullshit this time I mean really 

were some moments where they instead of giving you a cheap scare tactic, they would use a monster (usually a crawling vulgar) to lure your attention away... leaving time for another to get close to you without notice, or even just a zombie... if you're not paying attention WHACK... and on nightmare thats life you can't afford to lose most of the time. One more memorable time was watching a vulgar climb up a diagonal pipe to the left of a hallway, so you kind of keep your attention on the left hand side, then another jumps out from the right, it was good because both are directly in front of you, but it still manages to catch the player off guard... i really salute these kinds of things instead of the tired old, grab item teleport monster in. 

Any mappers on the credits whose names we may recognize? 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418645/trivia

* The game contains several references to the original Doom games. For example, one of the magazines lying about has a "surprised" face on it - that of the Doom Marine from the first two Doom games. Also, the "player face" on the arcade machine is that of the Doom Marine.

* Within approximately 1 day of release, there was already a game modification (or 'mod') which added a light to the pistol. In the game itself, players must swap between a flashlight, or a gun.

<SPOILER>
* The name of the doctor responsible for the disaster is Dr. Malcolm Betruger. "Betrug" is the German word for fraud or deceit, which is exactly what the doctor does.
</SPOILER>

* In the original Doom, the player lost all their equipment (except for a pistol and 50 bullets) at the beginning of every new episode (for a total of two times). Although no reason was given for this effective "restart" in every chapter, the concept was carried over into Doom 3, and the player loses all their equipment (twice), on the journey to and from Hell. There are also several other holdovers from the original doom, such as a boss fight that consisted of two Barons of Hell, toxic sludge, and more.

* In one of the mails found/discovered in the PDAs lying around the base, there's a "futuristic" version of an IP address. If you "subtract" a few digits from it so it becomes a "normal" present-day IP address and perform a "reverse DNS" you'll get: "idsoftware.com", the domain/site of the creators/developers of the game.

* The PDA audio logs closely resemble the format, tone, and pacing of the audiotape Ash listens to in _Evil Dead II (1987)_

* Development team averaged about 24 people.

* Originally was not intended to be made. John Carmack, unimpressed with the current plan for the company's next game, told his co-owners that unless Doom 3 was id software's next project, he would quit.

* While most of the levels exist highly ruined, the developers first built every level as if nobody had ever walked in them. Going through each level with special developer-only 'weapons', level designers would then dismantle the levels in order to create a highly damaged effect.

* Originally, the Soul Cube was going to be split into four sections, forcing the player to defeat each section's "Guardian". Designers felt that this would make the Cube seem weak, and opted instead to keep the Cube whole.

* If you kill Larry Kaczynski and take his PDA, you will find an email from a "John Okonkwo" that turns out to be the well known "Nigeria Scam", which is apparently still assaulting inboxes well into the 22nd Century. 

don't cut and paste when a simple URL will do. 

I saw Brandon James in the credits... now iirc, isnt he KillMe from Zerstorer and Quake2, and then left id during the dev of Q3A ? 

Interestingly, Darin McNeil also worked on RoE (another Zerstorer alumni ~_^).

Nerve seems to consist mostly of people from Rogue (who made Am. McGee's Alice, and the second missionpacks for both Q1 and Q2). 

ah, yeah, i didnt recall the names of other Zer members. i only remember KillMe for manson2.bsp which i love.

Nerve seems to specialise in taking id projects and doing it better... though i cant vouch on the q2 expansions... but didnt Nerve develop RTCW's multiplayer ? 

While most of the levels exist highly ruined, the developers first built every level as if nobody had ever walked in them. Going through each level with special developer-only 'weapons', level designers would then dismantle the levels in order to create a highly damaged effect.

First of all, most of the base was still in pristine condition aside from the ubiquitous blood and the bits that the massive throbbing tentacles tore open, but this is trumped up beyond recognition*. Making a room look disheveled with g_dragentity and putting in leaking pipes with editParticles is neat, but I'd hardly describe them as weapons.


* TRUBAR? 

 

I found there to be no WMPs. The presence of mappers was misleading. 

#terrafusion is obviously lacking in any kind of valuable intelligence :) 

#terrafusion presents a clear and present threat to mapping, even without WMPs.