Reevaluate Your Opinions

 

I can't help but feel that in recent years that the general gaming public has a bit of a problem when it comes to the way they treat games.  The way it seems to me is that a game comes along that ends up being the main character for a while, think titles like Red Dead, Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West, New God of War etc, then these games are played once by most people and then shelved while the user goes on whatever social media platform and joins the collective marketing driven gush is going on at the time.  After a period of time the collective gush dies down and everyone moves to the next thing, the game is largely forgotten in public discussion and the game is never played again by a majority of the people who bought copies of it. 

Writing about how this is a shitty way to be in this blog, now that I think about it, is probably a case of preaching to the choir because I know for a fact that the vast majority of people who engage with my little corner of the internet aren't like that but I think it's worth stating that it is a shitty way to be.  It's a shitty way to be at the peak of the games popularity because most games have higher difficulties and extras that are skipped by a majority of the userbase and its a shitty way to be after the fact because I'm of the opinion that reevaluating your old tastes to help better understand and appriciate the stuff you consume currently is good practice so allow me to regail you with 2 times that this happened to me.

The first case was only a few days ago from the publish date of this post with Doom 2016.  It took me a long time to get around to it since I went through a portion of my life using only trash laptops and I wasn't about to play a game like Doom on a console.  When I did play it I had a fun time with it but I remember feeling that the game was overly long and felt like an absolute slog to play by the end.  I enjoyed my time with it but the additional modes for score and time seemed like absolute overkill for a game that could barely handle its own length in the campaign.  This time around, however, I had a lot more fun with it.  I don't know if its because I'm just better at games or because of my even better hardware or because I was streaming it but the experience was significantly more enjoyable the second time around.  Upon finishing it I even had a go of the arcade mode to see what was up and found it to be a cool addition to the games content package.  If I'm being really honest with myself I think my opinion of  the game "barely being able to handle its own length" stems from the fact that the system I played it on originally was constantly crashing and blue-screening during the playthrough.  I was replaying sections a lot because of these hardware issues that were not fault of the game and yet it sullied my opinion of it.  I'm glad I went back to it because now its a title that has become a candidate for a possible future speedrun. 

The second and much more violent example of an opinion change is with The Evil Within.  I picked it up and played it around the time that it launched and holy fuckin hell did I absolutely HATE it at first.  I thought the horror elements were lame and trying overly hard to "scare" the player with just huge piles of gore.  But more than that I hated the game itself.  The first few chapters set me up to believe I was going to be playing a stealth game only for the majority of encounters to be some kind of ambush situation.  The constant lack of ammo and healing had me frustrated rather than on edge and when the game threw a boss at me I was either bored or frustrated.  The upgrade system was cumbersome and stupid and I felt that at base, every enemy was far too tanky and combat was not fun to engage in at all. But then I watched a friend of mine play it on Twitch and suddenly I felt the need to give it another try and my opinion did a complete 180.  Maybe its because I knew what challenges were ahead on the second try, maybe its because I was in a completely different head-space than the previous playthrough but either way I had a MUCH better time with it.  I still think the horror is kind of lame but maybe its because horror today is so oversaturated with untalented developers making complete shite that The Evil Within seems like a breath of fresh air.  But I also just enjoyed the game a lot more.  I understood from the outset this time that ammo is scarce and I played much smarter that I had a better time with it although the upgrade system is still stupid and using gel to upgrade pockets and sprint time is extremely annoying.  But overall I like The Evil Within now, its a cool game and I want to try and beat it on Akumu one day.

So go back and replay some of those things from your past.  Same goes for books and movies too, always worth seeing if stuff holds up for today you the same way it did for old you.  Maybe you'll discover something cool that rubbed you up the wrong way before or maybe you'll realize that younger you was an idiot that like trash.  Either way its a fun thing to do so go try it

Doom64 is absolutely horrible

 

I play a lot of games in a lot of genres and as a result of that I also play a lot of complete and utter shite.  Every so often, though, a game comes along thats so rancid in its design and content that it lodges itself in my brain and I can't stop thinking about it for a long time.  It's like seeing a horrible road accident where the images of people being sliced in half by pieces of car metal stick in your minds eye for weeks after the event.  It happened with Outlast 2, it happened with Holy Diver and now it's happening again with Doom64.

Doom64 was released, unsurprisingly, on the Nintendo 64 in 1997 and unlike previous console ports of Doom where it was just Doom 1 or 2 being brough to console, this was a whole new thing.  A unique Doom game for a brand new system, fucking wow, but in terms of the larger conversation of Doom and Boomer Shooters in general, 64 is a bit of a black sheep in the series and the genre.

On it's surface its a pretty competently made Doom game.  It's basically just more of what we got with Doom 1 and 2 with some redesigned monsters and a new gun to play with, what could possibly go wrong? Well fucking everything really.  

The first and most minor problem is the controls.  The N64 controller is already a gigantic piece of garbage made for octopus people (and even they don't like it that much, they told me) and playing an FPS on it feels like pulling teeth.  Running with the stick and walking with D-Pad is irritating but but the absolute worst thing about the controls is weapon switching.  The number of times I fucking died because I got ambushed by a large number of pinkies or imps and either couldn't pull the appropriate gun out fast enough OR accidentally switching to the rocket launcher and blowing my own face off made me want to rip and tear my own throat out.  There's a reason these games were originally made for PC where you could switch guns with a number key.  It's because using the right gun for the right situation is key to gameplay and having that shit hindered by having the guns just be in a list makes for a fucking awful time.  

Then there's the level design just being generally fucking awful.  When I was playing Doom 1 and 2 on stream I'd often complain pretty vocally about how I dislike the majority of levels designed by Sandy Petersen but I feel like I owe him an apology now because the Doom64 levels make even his most diabolical outings look like a walk in the park.  Sudden pits, crushers out of nowhere, pitch black rooms full of enemies, PLATFORMING are all common features in Doom64 maps that are likely to drive you insane.  One of the worst examples of this is a level early on where you are expected to sprint across a number of platforms that change height as you touch them.  I didn't know that's what was going on at first so I had 3 or 4 attempts where I just fell into the black pit of pinkies and ate shit.  The point of the section was so poorly conveyed that I had to look up a fucking YouTube walkthrough just to be able to tell what was even going on.  That's just one example too, go watch the VoDs on my YouTube channel of the playthrough I did recently for many, many hours of similar and equally frustrating bullshit. 

Then there's the thing that really stuck in my brain which is the games penchant for teleport ambushes.  In original Doom, ambush rooms were a common-ish thing.  You would walk into a room where there would be a gun or a key and when you grabbed it the walls would open.  The concept is introduced in E1M3 (I think) where picking up a blue key opens a wall to a few shotgunners and then you know its a thing you're supposed to look out for.  You can walk into a room and maybe predict if the walls are going on open, for a new player its a guessing game that keeps proceedings intense, keeps you on your toes.  Doom64 said fuck that though and just teleports enemies into a level, usually in positions that will completely fuck you with no warning.  The second to last level in the game is a great example of this where killing a Mancubus (at least I think that's the trigger) will spawn in an ARMY of imps, directly in your face.  If you know its coming you can move out of the area as your rocket travels through the air and avoid too much damage but for a new player it's just a shitty rookie trap.  Kill the enemy, OH WHOOPS NOW YOU'RE TRAPPED, dead and restart the level.  Imagine if you were playing something like Dungeons and Dragons and then when you kill a monster the dungeon master suddenly goes "oh by the way, there's 100 goblins in the room with you now".  You'd call him a piece of shit, break his teeth and never invite him to DnD sessions again.  That's what teleporting ambush spawns makes me want to do in Doom64.

The final and most irritating thing in Doom64 though is the final level.  It's a simple stage, a small room with a bunch of guns in it and then an arena.  At one end of the arena are 3 portals that spawn in an absolutely unreasonable amount of demons.  Once you kill them the final boss appears in the middle and starts barraging you with what I can only describe as a Mushihime-sama style bullet hell pattern.  Here's the kicker though, if you were thorough enough in the previous levels to find the secret maps then you may have also found 3 Hell Keys.  The hell keys upgrade one of your guns AND allow you to close the portals early, meaning the number of pre-boss demons you have to fight is significantly more reasonable.  The game makes no mention of this at any point and I don't care if its written in the manual because who the fuck ever kept manuals for N64 games? No one I knew that's for damn sure.  I have seen footage of people beating this stage from a pistol start without the keys because my initial reaction was that it seemed impossible without them but in order to pull it off you actually have to be some kind of Doom God.

Here's the thing though.  The game fucking sucks.  I don't WANT to explore the levels because the levels are ass and full of bullshit, I just want to get through them as fast as possible so I can stop fucking playing Doom64 and move onto a better game like Action52 or Video Cart-8: Magic Numbers for the Fairchild Channel F.  Getting good at something or taking the time to explore something is only worth doing when the game is good and Doom64 is certainly not that.  Therefore, I fucking cheated to see the ending.  Usually I'm extremely anti using codes and stuff to get through a game but when the thought of playing it any longer was actually ruining my mood and the prospect of streaming it further was ruining my entire DAY before going live, I don't give a shit.  Maybe if there was any indication of the existance of those keys, even in the form of a cryptic comment or something, I would have grinned and beared it because then its my fault, but to be blindsided by a sudden key requirement on the final level that would require me to go play the majority of the game over again?  Get fucked.

Doom64 got re-released for PC where you can use mouse and keyboard and they brightened the game a little bit so its not so unplayably dark at all times but even then I can't imagine it being any better.  Maybe my point about the controls being ass would be fixed but the rest of the broken, rancid design of Doom64 still remains.

Fuck this game, send it to hell along with the people who made it