Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20161116194210/@comment-3547390-20161217223224

Hah, indeed, I enjoyed it quite a bit too. As I keep saying, it feels like a precursor to Unreal in some ways while being like Duke Nukem.

I was a bit skeptical indeed. Like I said, I am not going to be singing songs of praise since I feel like it has still has some old school stuff, but it also has a lot of stuff in its favor. Not having to spam every wall like Heretic feels definitely welcome, that is one thing that heavily prevented my enjoyment. It didn't help with stat screens at the end of every level telling me how horrible I did, so not having stats that I need to care about is probably the best thing that could happen to a Doom engine game. In fact, I like the Hub based gameplay and the fact that things are connected together. Still not a big fan of respawning enemies, especially since they are weak mooks it feels pretty tedious. That part feels a lot like System Shock, but luckily that is the most I have seen so far with a heavily RPG influence (System Shock had a lot of that stuff which really dragged down the game). I like the freedom to jump and the fact that it feels like I am less likely to be breaking mechanics, even if I nearly broke the entire sequence of the first hub.

So besides respawning enemies, the game is pretty decent. I guess my biggest gripe is the whole fact that it is still on the Doom engine, which means it still tends to have some movement clunkiness and while environments are more dynamic, it still cannot include a massive ton of furniture to really flesh out rooms. Plus the focus is a lot like Heretic, the entire thing is focused on fighting a large number of mooks instead of some difficult enemies. Plus I get confused a lot what I am doing simply because the design is still much like Heretic in the fact that they are making them maze-like lengthy romps. Still, this is an evolution in the right direction, removing stats and spamming walls, two things that really bugged me to no end with these old games and something after Duke 3d and Daggerfall I didn't expect to see in a sprite FPS. I guess at the end of the day I feel this is a product that is decent for the limitations they had, though on reflection of the entire genre feel it still cannot hold its own to what came later, which is why I can find myself enjoying it but not really finding it on par with 96+ games.

I will say punching things here feels a thousand times better than in Doom. The problem with Doom was always that the last resort fists were so weak and the enemies so predictable that I felt like the whole situation was very tedious. This is pretty much a great example of a game reliant on fists that works well, enemies die in a few hits at most so far but are extremely lethal while trying to close the gap. This is pretty much what I wanted from a game involving a lot of melee and is definitely one of the stronger aspects of the game.

When I did Daggerfall, I did enough to bring full closure to the game, so I definitely will try out the other two classes near the end and compare the experiences. I personally believe I made a great choice with the warrior, I like speed and fast movement, so I am not sure how slow-paced combat would feel here, especially in a game where every level feels pretty long to begin with. In a later game, slowness could be appropriate, but here it would be the equivalent of always walking in Doom. It just would be clunky in my opinion.

I am glad to hear it. I honestly have little to no idea what I am doing, I mostly am just following the cues from the game and blundering aimlessly to see where I go. I will say the puzzles here feel a lot better than I was worried, they feel more like little additions for first time players that at the same time aren't tedious. They are one of the things I can compare to Unreal's style and appreciate.

As I play this, I am recognizing that when you mean Hub, you meant less like Unreal and more like System Shock. Yeah, I think this is pretty comparable to that style, which means I have a little familiarity with it but never got too far (we kinda stopped that series early because Dominus had trouble being around and I had corruption of my hard drive).

I definitely am looking forward to continuing this. The hard part is that I am not really getting a break, so unless you can watch me at a drastically different time (2 AM your time) it still is pretty limited to weekends. The great news is that we are not at all limited to one session, I basically am recording in bulk, then separating different sections and breaking it apart for the videos (Part 1 has already been uploaded). With my large hard drive and a lot smaller file sizes, I think we probably could play the entirety of this game without filling my hard drive... especially since the videos go to the 2 TB drive. Needless to say, we can continue whenever you feel we can. Just propose a day, Friday and Saturday work best like we did last night, while the weekend works at 2 AM your time as I pretty much have to go to sleep at 7 AM your time. The hard part, as always, will of course involve me actually showing up on time. I swear it knows when I am recording... this is the third alarm clock I have tried that has done this and yet works perfectly fine otherwise. Five days a week I work, I haven't had any trouble getting up for work any day since I got this new alarm. I set two alarms to make sure one at least goes off. And yet both failed me last night.