Video Game Review: DOOM

I played all through Doom and Doom 2 back in the day. Maybe not as many playthroughs as others, but still. Those games were groundbreaking to early-20s me--more immersive than anything I’d seen. Even today, the action stands up quite well against the modern shooter, even if the play in the genre has completely evolved.

The new Doom (call it Doom 4 or Doom 2016 if you want) is a total throwback to that age, which is exactly what id and Bethesda have been telling us for months. It is absolutely glorious. No reloading weapons. No cover. No regenerating health. No stopping. Just run everywhere at full speed and blast demons in the face for a few hours.

But this, too, has evolved. There’s now jumping, and it’s used to good effect on extremely vertical maps. There are weapon mods that can be switched on the fly. Throwable grenades. A new weapon (gauss rifle). And there are the glory kills--Mortal Kombat-esque finishing moves when you’ve weakened even the largest demons enough.

The older Dooms were non-stop action fests with absolutely no plot. You just shot your way through a maze, picking up health and ammo as you went. The new Doom wraps the action with a thin veneer of story; just enough to tell you WHY you need to get to the other end of the maze. I’ve seen some complaints about the story being hackneyed or superfluous (I’m looking at you, Ars Technica and Kyle Orland) but I found it totally natural. And believable? If anything in this universe is held to be acceptable, then the story is no more ridiculous.

In addition to the gameplay, the visuals are absolutely stunning. The Mars dirt, used-and-abused metal corridors, demonic beasts and their cyber-modified brethren--all are equally eye-appealing. The animations of both demon and player are fluid and well designed. The glory-kill animations take some beats of time, but they’re hurried to limit that time, and done so in a way that they don’t really suffer. And the whole thing plays without slowdowns or stutters (aside from a handful of times that I completed Rune Challenges and the game engine seemed to slow down by 75% until I restarted the game). I’m still using a GTX680 video card, which was a good performer 5 years ago, but is pretty far behind the curve now. Even so, I played the game on high graphics settings (there is an ultra high) and it looked fantastic and ran surprisingly smoothly.

If I have any complaints, the first would be about the environment being TOO vertical at times. The visual fidelity, high rate of speed, and absolute drops can really play havoc with my acrophobia. That’s not the kind of thrill I’m looking for. Actually, it’s a kind of adrenaline rush I try to avoid at all costs. I could also complain about boss fights, I suppose--I’ve never liked them, but I knew full well that Doom would have some. They’re invariably and inevitably less interesting than the typical combat set pieces. Only one opponent (or two)? Much easier to dodge. Have to run completely through 2 of your 3 types of ammo? That’s not actually fun and can lead to frustration. The final boss fight in particular was vexing for its consumption of absolutely all resources. Finally, I can’t stress this enough: I hate it when game developers don’t allow us the option to save games. HATE it.

All this, and I’m only talking about the single-player campaign, which I completed in probably less than 20 hours. It would have been faster, but I was working diligently to find as many secrets as I could (no advice existed on teh intarwebs because I started playing at 7:00AM on release day) and power up my armor and weapons. Even so, that left many secrets undiscovered, which failing I’m currently addressing by being allowed to replay any level in my save-game slot. There’s still a whole multiplayer game (which I haven’t tried) and Snapmap, which allows you to quickly build new maps and play ones created by others. There’s some visual scripting that Snapmap is capable of, so it’ll be interesting to see what the player base will have created a year from now.

So I’ll break it down:

• Base run-and-gun gameplay: 70%
• Meaty, satisfying, moddable weapons: 15%
• Smooth-as-glass graphical performance: 15%
• All this is only 1/3 of the package: 10%
• Sometimes overly dependent on verticality: -5%
• Complete dependence on checkpoints: -10%

Verdict: 95%. Go get it. GET IT NOW!

The Effect of Mass: Gravity

Here it is, 2:50 in the morning.  I've been awake for the last hour, and had only 3 hours of sleep to this point.  I'm tired, but my brain won't turn off.


It's because I've finished my Mass Effect story.  I've always considered my soldier-class character with the heart of gold to be my "real" character, my "real" story.  All the other characters have been somehow copies or shadows of the "real" universe.  As such, I've always taken my soldier character through the game first.  In fact, after the hard drive crash a few months ago that cost me all of my saved games, the soldier is the only one I'd remade all the way through the first two games.  (Though I do have Michelle's character through the first game and my second, "mirror universe" character through the first game as well.)


Finishing my story has been an emotional roller coaster, particularly in the 3rd game.  Now that it's over, there's a void.  A hole in my heart.


It seems so silly, and makes me feel like I have to turn in my man card, but...when I finished earlier today, I laid down and cried for half an hour.


I don't expect anyone to understand, even Michelle.  (She didn't understand, but she was sympathetic and didn't make fun of me; she supported me as best she could.  I'm so glad I have her.)  I'm not even sure I fully understand, and I think that's why I'm awake at 3:00.  I imagine that I seem obsessed or crazy to other people, and I'm OK with that.  I've tried to articulate what has hooked me into the the ME universe before, but I'm not sure I've ever sufficiently explained myself.  Perhaps my attachment is simply unfathomable.


So what got to me today?  I don't think there's one, single factor that put me in that particular place. In fact, I think there are 3 factors that led me there.

1. The final installment of the trilogy is a war.  I can say that without delivering spoilers, because if you're reading this, then you're either a fan of the game and knew this was coming; or you're not inclined to play it and so don't really care to witness the lead-in.  Either way, there've been trailers on the Internet and even TV commercials that have revealed that fact.  Being a soldier in a war, it's expected that not everyone you know will see the end of the war.  So I mourn the loss of characters who I consider friends.  They'll be missed.  These losses have been increasingly weighing on me as I've progressed through the last game and through the whole trilogy.  
2. The ending that I experienced wasn't as tidy as the earlier games.  In the first game, I took down the antagonists, looked like I might not have survived the destruction of the enemy ship, but climbed out of the rubble to soldier on.  In the second game, I took a team of specialists on a suicide mission and managed to not lose a single one.  In the third...there are permanent consequences to my actions and choices.  Galaxy-altering consequences.  It's not that I'm upset that BioWare made me a universe that didn't end up with a "happily ever after" that's bothering me.  As a story device, I'm satisfied with the ending I experienced.  No, it's more that I've altered the way things work in that universe, and it's messy.  I'm trying to communicate this without spoiling anything, and it's not easy.  There's a sense of loss, rather than dissatisfaction, that goes with how my story turned out.  It was a gritty, non-fairy-tale ending; satisfying, but leaving me with a hole in my heart.
3. There's no more to the story.  It's done.  In fact, it's so done that it has occurred to me to not actually play it again, as if another playthrough would somehow diminish what has occurred before.  Clearly that won't be the case--I need to see how the universe changes as I make different choices throughout the story.  Even if BioWare ever decided to make a Mass Effect 4 (and being owned by EA, I could certainly see them having to make a 4th game), I'm not sure I could play it.  My favorite game series EVER, and the story is so wrapped up and completed that I don't think I could play another one.  So the story is done, gone, never going to be new again.  It's like catching up with an old friend with terminal cancer and when you part at the end of your time together, you actually KNOW that you will never see this person again.  I can never again have a first-time experience with a chapter of the Mass Effect story, and that is creating far more sadness than I ever thought possible for just a game.

It's all weighing heavily.  It has my brain in a constant turmoil, preventing rest.  (I'm down to a sleep availability of 2.5 hours for the night.  I just finished a 3-day weekend to live this story, so there's no way I'm going to call in sick!)

I don't know if anyone will understand me or sympathize.  I don't even think Michelle really gets what I'm going through, but she's trying to help me in any way she can.  (Even as she's prodding me to get "her" character through ME2, so that I can start making her movies of ME3, which is how she experiences the story.)  I don't know whether this blog entry will bring me peace so that I can sleep, or if my friends and co-workers will simply make fun of me for being a wuss who cried because of a game...

For me though, the story was as close to perfect as I could ever expect or hope to encounter.

There are books in the game universe.  They're peripheral to this story, though ME3 did have some characters from those books show up.  The writing of those books isn't great; it's OK, but more like pulp science fiction than an epic saga.  In some ways though, I wish that the main story of the game was told in a series of books, just so that more people could share in it--the kind of people who wouldn't be at all inclined to play the games for the story.  That's why I've made movies of the game story, just so I could share with Michelle.  (And why I'm remaking those movies, after their loss in the great hard-drive crash.  Hell, I spent $80 on movie-editing software because I was sick of the free Windows one.)

So there it is.  I've told the world that the game made me cry.  That won't come back to haunt me...

Maybe, just maybe, I can finally sleep.

Effective Mass

I think I have a problem.  Well, I know I have a lot of problems (who doesn't?) but I'm focusing on a particular one: I think I want to marry the Mass Effect series and have its babies.

I just can't seem to get enough of the game series.  Speaking objectively, it's got what this gamer would ask for: a decent story line, development of characters, rich setting and background, plenty of action, and the chance to be the galaxy's ultimate bad-ass.  That's not to say there are no flaws: Bioware does have a habit of giving the player lots of FedEx missions; driving the Mako over all the giant rocky crags and craggy rocks is maddening; searching planets in 2 to probe them for minerals is also maddening; even with this urgent sense of "you must do X to save Y," there's still all this time to take on all these other side missions.

But what is I that I like about the games?  Why can't I get them out of my head?  In the case of the first game, I can answer that: there's a sense of actually BEING the central character in an epic adventure movie or book.  It'd be like actually BEING Aragorn, for example.  This is particularly true at the end of the first game.  In fact, the first time I finished it, I had to go be alone with my thoughts for an hour or so, and just ponder.  The second game starts with a similar sense of being that central hero in an amazing trial, and combines it with an event that just rips your guts out.  I won't risk spoilers, though anyone who's reading this has either already seen what I'm talking about or isn't going to play the games.  Still, every time I watch that opening, I feel like I've been gut-kicked.  At least I don't tear up when I see it anymore (I did the first 3 or so times).

Aside from that opening, the second game doesn't have quite that same drive, even at the ending.  I still feel like a hero accomplishing a neigh-impossible task, but it doesn't have the same...punch?  Depth?  Impact?  Don't get me wrong: it's just as cinematic and profound as the first one.  It just doesn't make me feel sad that the journey through the game is over.

I think that's probably what it is that moves me about the first game: it ends.  There's an amount of enforced tragedy prior to that, and that's got weight, but even that's not what I'm talking about.  By the time I've finished the first game, I feel like I've been living in this colorful universe, and now I'm being kicked out to return to my mundane life.

To try to get across just how much I'm into these games (trying to avoid the word "obsessed"):

• There are 6 character classes in the game.  I have one of each of 5 of them that I've played all the way through BOTH games.
• I've bought the soundtrack .mp3s on Amazon.  All of them.
• I've bought all of the DLC (downloadable content) for ME2.
• My computer wallpaper rotates to a new image every 10 minutes.  Roughly 2/3 of the images are screenshots from the 2 games.  For both my desktop at home and my laptop at work.
• I've bought and read the books.  There are 3 of them.  They aren't great, but they're written by one of the writers for the game, so they maintain a little of the flavor.
• I felt the need to share my joy with my wife.  So I had one playthrough in which I ran Fraps (a utility for capturing games in movie form), recorded what I felt was the most important stuff overall, edited the movies, and showed them to her.  So she got to experience a little of what I do every time I play through.  And what a trooper: she actually watched all of it, and it took us somewhere around 30 hours to do so.

After all that, you'd think I'd be sick of the game(s) by now, but you'd be wrong.  I find that I'm pondering starting an Engineer character (yes, the one class I haven't hit yet is MY class) in ME1.  I still have a few characters that I need to run through some of the ME2 DLC that became available after I'd finished their runs, too.

I've heard Mass Effect being called the "Star Wars of the current generation."  I'd have to disagree, but only because it doesn't have the cultural icon status that Star Wars has.  Maybe it will with time, but I rather doubt it.  Aside from that one fact though, I'd have to agree.  It is, in my book, that epic.