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Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown
bonch writes "Steve Bowler, lead animator for Midway Games, has written an article for Next Generation called Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown. He talks about id no longer being the king of the hill in the FPS genre, losing the multiplayer gaming wars to Counter-strike and the engine licensing wars to competitors like Unreal 3.0, and focusing too much on rendering realistic environments at the expense of modern gameplay features. From the article: 'It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.'"
Dupe...original article can be found here.
Almost the same title, too.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Zombies can remain animated independant of if their head is intact or not.
Who writes these things anyway? Honestly folks.
RTFA again for the best results.
Light dancing around the room?
We're talking about doom 3 right?
Light?
Umm.. maybe how nice it looks when you shine your flashlight around the room... unless you have your gun out...
One of the real reasons Doom3 never took off is because I needed to buy a new computer to use it. And so did everyone else.
Counterstrike runs on crap hardware, and basically, a crap internet connection. You'll get called a lagger, a newbie, and a lamer, but it will work, and you can play, and have fun.
Gameplay is extremely important, but so too is availability.
Duped story so I'll dupe my comment.
Doom 3 was a great game, imo, however people's complaints about the whole flashlight mechanism were justified, and I can see how it would detract from the entertainment value. Id's goal was to make a scary game, and if you played the game with the swapped-in flashlight as they intended, it was indeed scary. The lighting was better than in any game I'd played at that point and created an unparalleled atmosphere of creepiness.
That being said, the idea that in "the mysterious future" you wouldn't be able to hold both a flashlight and a gun hurt the game's credibility. And going for the cheap scare so many times did tend to get old.
They were also determined to make D3 a single-player game in a field now dominated by multiplayer and massively-multiplayer games. I would have thought that they'd have realized this better than anyone, given that they practically created the market for multiplayer FPS gaming, but they chose to make Doom 3 a single player game, and between that and the whole flashlight deal, many people decided the game was a dud, and thus its fate was sealed.
I still thought it was a great game though!
rooooar
Veteran animator Steve Bowler (pictured) got pretty angry when he bought Doom 3. And he's still a mite agitated...
What was it, 12 years ago, that we first laid eyes on the original, the dark new 3D world that was Doom? Even before that, a select few of us recall with wonder the revival of one of our favorite gaming franchises, in a bold new direction, when Wolfenstein 3D hit the shelves.
For a dozen years Id has been the top dog, the guy to beat, the pater familia to the first-person shooter. It can look back on a legacy of six games, each one an unstoppable sales juggernaut, a technological milestone. You didn't need to know what the review score was for an Id title. You only knew that you needed to buy it.
But one day, the industry changed. The consumer changed. It's hard to put one's finger on it. Maybe it was Counter-Strike. Maybe Unreal Tournament. Something happened to the genre between Quake III and Doom 3, and Id somehow didn't take it into account. Call it braggadocio, or hubris, but Doom 3 is no longer the top dog in the FPS market.
Yes, it's upsetting. I tried not to admit it either. But it's undeniably true.
Some have even argued that Doom 3 is a step backwards in FPS gaming, that even when it hit the shelves we were already years past where it hoped to position itself.
The problem, it seems, lies at the core of where Doom came from, and the hopes we had for Doom 3. It was a tale of gameplay, graphics, and mistakes.
Zombie shuffle
We're all familiar with the helter-skelter breakneck balls-to-the-wall pace that the original Doom set. So where is it in Doom 3? I can appreciate the slow zombie shuffle as much as the next guy, but when Halo's Flood race existed years before Doom's sequel, one has to ask why exactly we're experiencing only one or two imps at a time.
Obviously, there's a reason why we don't have a dozen imps chasing us down a corridor, and I'm inclined to say that it's because of the graphics engine. So much attention has been paid to rendering a realistic environment that there just isn't a lot of room left for that many bad guys. This left the guys at Id with a bit of a conundrum: How could they still make the game tense and as terrifying as the originals?
The answer, evidently, is to have shit jump out of the dark at you.
Yes, I jumped. I was scared. And then I got tired. Tired of having secret panels open behind me after I'd already cleared the room of any possible beasts from hell, only to get clawed in the back. Who knew demons were capable of such stealth and chicanery? Hey, maybe I'll open this door and--surprise!--here's yet another instant 25 hit points removed from my health because an imp was waiting patiently for me to open a door. This isn't gaming. This isn't the Id I know. This is scripted nonsense.
And yet, in the face of such scripted trickery, the A.I. then proceeds to fall flat on its face when given an empty room and a box to hide behind. If it doesn't have a gun, the A.I. just comes straight at you trying to claw your eyes out. If it does have a gun, it hides behind corners and boxes, but since the game lacks a headshot--something which has become so common in FPSs now that it's no longer a boastable feature--it takes an implausible amount of time to dispatch them.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I recall levels in the original Doom where you were downright encouraged to trick the A.I. into fighting itself. Yes, it was a primitive A.I., but I recall being impressed by it. Hell, even the famed Reaperbot for the original Quake is still 10 times more entertaining than fighting drones in Doom 3.
I guess what it all boils down to is the fact that the gameplay is just too simplified for the graphics. It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.
And don't
And this is based on your real world experience with Zombie's I presume?
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Id hasn't really been a player on the FPS game market in a while. Their recent games (Quake 3, Doom 3) have basically been technology demos. They sell well because we nerds think it is cool, but the actual games leave much to be desired.
We know that Id makes its money from licensing its engines to people. Half-life made Id some money. Keep that in mind. I'm not sure if the Source engine takes anything from one of Id's engines.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Now that's something I've never understood in the movies or in the games. I mean, if you're a zombie, you don't have a brain. Period. It's all mush and all you want to do is to eat the brain of someone else for some obscure reason (protein content, perhaps?). So, why would a headshot be more effective against a zombie than a bodyshot? It just doesn't make any sense. If I were facing a zombie and I had a shotgun, I'd just shoot his bloody legs off and run away bravely.
The owls are not what they seem
It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.
You are forgetting about the BLOOD SUCKING LIGHTBULB MONSTERS!
Is that the engine only seems to be able to do dark well. Something always seemed wrong when I played the game, it seemed too dark. Yes, I know it's supposed to be dark, but something was off. I couldn't put my finger on it, but later someone pointed it out to me: The game doesn't have any kind of radiosity.
Radiosity is the property of multiple light reflections. When a light shines on a surface it reflects, of course. However that light can then further reflect off another surface and so on. That's what leads to soft shadows, and is the reason why when you turn on a flashlight, the whole room is slightly illuminated, not just what oyu are pointing at.
Doom 3 doesn't do this, a light hits a surface and will reflect to the screen, but there's no multple levels of reflections. The net effect is hard shadows, corners that are always dark. You can't get a good brightly lit scene.
Now I don't fault them on this, doing radiosity in realtime isn't feasable at this point on most cards. However other games can deal with this, the don't do all their lighting in realtime. Some is done in realtime, some is a precomputed light map. That allows for a global illumination, but one that doesn't have to happen in realtime.
That is my big problem with the engine. Sure it's more accurate than the UT2004 engine, technicly speaking, but it doesn't look as good. UT is "faking" the lighting and shadows, but they look good, and you can have a nice brightly lit outdoor map, or a dark indoor map, and they both work. You can have a light source that casts light on to all surfaces, even those it doesn't directly hit, since it's calculated before hand.
Personally, I'd rather have a game engine that looks good rather than one that is more accurate.
I don't get it if its a dupe why is the site still slashdotted? Don't people trust any one anymore?
...and irrelevant rant about Doom 3. It's clearly not everyone's taste, but the hell, I really enjoyed playing id's final version of what the original Doom was meant to be, but could not become, due to technological drawbacks back in time. So this guy, while providing you mit wrong "facts" about "no headhsot in teh g4me 'n stuff dud3!12" (in fact, the Doom 3 engine FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER featured collision-detection based on the actualy polygonal structure of objects, NOT just el-cheapo-hitboxes, and definately recognizes different body-zones of its models!) basically just spills biased mud in the company's face that will get Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as well as the sequel to Quake 2 delivered soon, constantly innovates the industry in the field of real-time 3D-graphics, and sold its latest and greatest groundbreaking engine to be incorporated into some of the most eagerly awaited games in the genre.
Yeah, I see clearly now, id is doomed.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Even though the gameplay itself for D3 was far below what it should have been, I have to say I must give them credit for being able to create such a powerful and frightening environment as they did. D3 was the first game I've played since the Marine campaign of AvP that actually made me scream, jump out of my chair, and have to leave the room. (Yes, I'm a sissy.)
Everyone craps on D3 so much, and it bugs me. Yes, gameplay is probably the most important quality in a video game, and I admit it was severely lacking in D3. But dammit, they really really excelled in other areas and did a few things other video games just don't do. They do deserve some credit.
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
Morrowind, of course, was an RPG, but it wouldn't be impossible to remake Doom 3 or UT2004 to look and act like it.
The thing is, non linear games where your actions determine your standing in the game, as well as its path and outcome, are the wave of the future. Especially games with thousands of mini adventures on the side. Also, in Morrowind you interacted with practically *everything*.
If Morrowind were not done years ago and were done today through the Doom 3 *or* Unreal 2 Engine (either of which would imply far fewer bugs than Bethesda's own "engine"), it would eclipse all other games in popularity for 2 years. I say that because Morrowind appears to be almost the single player's equivalent of Starcraft in popularity and longevity.
The lesson: forget the graphics arms race, achieve Doom 3 or UT2004 level graphics and leave it at that, and concentrate on a deep, complex, non linear, "easy to get into it quick" story lines, and endless paths of quest resolution. Give FPS players a world to explore, tweak the outcomes, and generally have fun in.
ID somehow appears to be furthest behind in pursuing this goal, even though Doom 3 is no more linear than HL2 or Unreal 2.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I read the other Slashdot thread. But one thing I found missing there (and in the article itself was) - how did ID really loose the crown of engine linsencing? As the article noted the Unreal3 engine is all over the press, but you see no sign of other companies moving to use the Doom3 engine for other products.
Is the Doom3 really not as capabile of expansive environments, really not as easy to program? How did ID let that slide by?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"And while id was looking down.
Unreal stole its gaming crown..."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Carmack et al are on record as saying that games don't need story. Romero (that other one) was booted out of id after he tried to get them to focus on gameplay and design, not just graphics. Admittedly he failed spectacularly, but from that point one id was a one trick pony. They make pretty looking games where you kill zombies/cyborgs and collect keycards.
Is this behind the times in terms of gameplay? Sure. Imo, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 both beat the pants off DOOM3 (and Painkiller and Max Payne) in terms of gameplay and design. And they're more than five years old!
Frankly, DOOM was only "revolutionary" because it was the first game that really nailed how to do graphics good enough to make an FPS game work. Expecting fabulous gameplay out of id is like expecting a Terminator movie to bring you to tears.
DOOM3 is about shooting things. Period. Don't like it, okay, I can relate, but don't try to act as if this is a surprise.
now they get slashdotted on the dupe, too.
Holy cow, that's gotta suck.
>> ..having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body.. ...In Doom3 you can also blow their heads right off and they still keep coming. Evidently a zombie's head isn't a critical organ, so the body should be more suceptible to damage than the head actually.
At least, now they do. The requirements for game development are increasing every day, stretching development cycles and requiring more resources.
id's games have always been about groundbreaking technology, so it's not surprising that as development costs expand, gameplay filligrees in id titles suffer (relative to the competition). id uses its games as technology demos. Don't get me wrong, I love 'em, but their focus is not on the sort of game logic that distinguishes the experiences this story refers to (no, I haven't RTFA yet). Let's face it: AI is an interesting area that needs improvement, but programming headshots is boring. Making realtime rendering engines as good as they can be is a real technical challenge, and something that id can do better than anyone else. That's what makes them unique, and consequently it's also what makes them money -- not from game sales, but from engine licensing.
Saying that Carmack doesn't know how to build a truly engaging game is like saying that Lucas doesn't know how to write a truly engaging script. [Rolls eyes]
No... you caught the dupe, and most likely would've rejected it. You are not qualified. :p
Laziness, check. Impatience, check. Hubris, double check!
FPS games that are single-player only never last.
And you know this because? Based oin the lack of a available servers to log into? What? I know lots of people still playing Morrowind a year later.
Everyone plays ut2k4, hl2, CS, whatever because it's fun either sneaking around and sniping people, or jumping around flinging rockets.
I'll bet money that there are still more people playing Quake 3 than all those games put together. Tens of thousands of people every day on their office LANs. It's not generating any new revenue for Id, but Id is still the king by far if you're counting numbers of current players. "Hardcore" gamers and the gaming rags are so far out of touch with the mainsteram that it's rediculous.
#7 says get out of the car and onto a bike. Bikes can be tipped over easily and offer no offensive value. Now a truck with a suitably large bumper offers both offensive and defensive value. What better way to take out a dozen zombies in the road way than just making sure you got both hands on the wheel and preparing for a slight, momentary, loss of traction as you travel over crushed re-dead bodies?
As Interstate '76 said:
"Don't get out of the car, never get out of the car."
(tactic worked well in many places of GTA3)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I never understood how people got "lost" in Morrowind. From the moment you get off the ship, they tell you where to go and who you need to see to begin the main quest. All of the other quests are pretty self-explanitory, despite the fact they are not presented on a sliver platter. There is some work involved and that seems to throw some gamers off.
Far more people are used to "On-The-Rails" RPGs, where you must do this, then this then this, etc. Playing a game like Morrowind requires a mentality shift. The game is not in control of the experience, you are. I firmly believe that is the better type of game, but opinions differ.
The problem I see is that for too many gamers, the goals must be rammed down their throats before they can do anything. To suddenly say "Hey, we've created this entire world, have fun!" is too much for them to deal with. Not because they are stupid, but because it is so vastly alien to them.
Personally, I will be far less likely to buy an "On-The Rails" game because it is too frustrating. I have this great world around me, but it is very much like being on a train. I can see all of the potential, but everything is predestined. No getting off to enjoy the scenery and explore the world rushing past my window. I must fight this guy, I must go here...I get pissed. If I wanted to be led around, I would have put in a DVD movie instead. I want to go off on my own and do my own thing.
With Morrowind, I can slip in and out of the main plot at will, or ignore it completely. There is no forced-anything. From the moment I walk out into Seyda Neen, the options are virtually limitless. I can go anywhere, do anything and be any kind of character that I want to.
Choice is good, replayability is fantastic and having the opportunity to simply walk away for a while and pick up right back where I was in my "other life" is priceless. I've done marathon sessions before, but only because I've had a night where I had nothing better to do. You get sucked so far into the game and your character, but unlike Everquest and World Of Warcraft, myself (and other Morrowind fans that I know) find it very easy to put the controller down and not let it consume our real lives.
Being able to not just live one adventure, but continue on a lifetime of them, without it getting in the way of everything else (or costing money every month) just can't be beat.
I know it's a dupe, but this time I get to respond instead of just giving mod points...
I played D3 at a friends house for about an hour. Big screen, dark room, was fun. But the fact is, I'm not the gamer I was back in the early nineties; zombies just don't do it for me anymore. Doom was amazing because it was a technical tour de force; I still remember walking into some of those rooms and going 'that is so *cool*!' Frankly, the whole zombie/monster story was pretty old even then, but Doom was such a good game, I was happy to play the entire thing. Hell, I did the same for D2.
Quake was pretty good, but seemed like pretty much the same thing with a slightly mideval twist to it. By the time Q2 came around, it seemed like I was playing the "same-old-thing", even though, id never disappointed in the graphics level.
But in the intervening years I'd gotten married, had kids, played a lot of other games, and given the time I now have to play, I'm looking for something different and original. Id seems to think that they can coast on demonic bitmaps and licensing forever.
Zombies die quicker with shots to the head than shots to the body, at least with the pistol. It takes two or three shots to the head, as opposed to the correctly mentioned six body shots. And this is on the Normal difficulty. But honestly, if you're going to dis DOOM3, don't rattle on something that actually exists! If I recall correctly, it has per-pixel hit detection too.
...both Taco's hand and Zonk's hand are doing the same things.
Ron dies in chapter 9 of book 7.
"I'll bet money that there are still more people playing Quake 3 than all those games put together."
:)
Nope. CS has been by far the biggest multiplayer FPS. Unreal Tournament comes in a distant second.
See for yourself.
And from talking to other gamers, it seems that most of the Quake 3 players have moved on to either Painkiller, RTCW. And don't forget Call of Duty, Battlefield (1942,vietnam,2), and Day of Defeat...I think some one is a little behind on their FPS's
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Back in the days of Doom 2 and Quake, there was no real competition to what ID made. In the days of Quake 2 there was, but ID was the one who made the best engine, and they were the first to sell a game based on it obviously. Quake 2 was just as bad a game as Doom 3 is when looking at the single player part of it.
What was good about Quake 2 was its multiplayer mode. While Quake 1 allowed multiplayer as well, the initial DOS version required either external tools for IP networking, or a nullmodem cable or modem connection for multiplayer modes.
Then came Quake 3, which never got a playable single player mode, rather, it concentrated on multiplayer mode almost exclusively. The engine however was capable of single player mode quite well as shown by for example Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
By the time of Quake 3, it was clear that ID could create a good engine, but needed third parties for creating good content, and one can argue that Quake 3 served more as a demonstration of the graphics capabilities of the Engine then anything else.
In the years to follow quite a few good games were build on this engine, including what I still consider one of the best multiplayer games so far, Enemy Territory. This resulted from finding a very good balance between complexity of gameplay (relatively simple) and realism (amazingly good for its time). You can get inmersed in the games without having to learn too much, and can quickly learn enough to have an enjoyable gaming experience.
It seems to me the mistakes with Doom 3 are in 2 distinct areas. First of all, the balance between gameplay and realism is not right (as the article suggests also). Second, and imho even more important, ID can't create proper content, and rehashing the same old content in a new engine is just boring. They saw this when making Quake 3, and didn't even try, but failed to remember this for Doom 3. They were making a demo for the engine and confused it with making a complete game with entertaining content.
To me this is quite evident from the fact that old (Doom 2) based games like terminal velocity and a game like Duke Nukem 3d are a lot more fun to play then anything ID ever made except maybe for the original Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein.
The interesting thing, I think, is that Doom I & II were released shareware. Doom had to be a seriously good game or no one would ever have bought the full version. How many full versions of Doom3 would have been sold, I wonder?
The original versions of Doom 1 and 2 were called shareware, but they were not proper shareware. A possitive name for them would be 'demo', a less positive name would be 'crippleware'. ID used a shareware like method by lack of a proper and widespread distribution channel, but for the rest very little changed.
If you wanted, you could have downloaded a demo version of Doom 3, and looked at the game before buying it, just like I did.
What did make a difference of course is that due to the hype, more people got the full version of Doom 3 without ever seeing the demo.
Were Doom 1 and 2 good games? I think they were, but mostly due to being different from anything else at the time, and thus being revolutionary. Doom 3 just rehashes the same kind of content, and well, we have seen enough of it already.
An entirely different question is what will happen with the engine on the long term. For example, I do run the Quake 3 engine a lot, but not because I play QUake 3 a lot... I did run the Quake 1 engine a lot, but not ecause of playing Quake 1 that much (tho I did play and finish it)
As I mentioned in another post, ID is not good at creating content, and ever since total conversions of Doom 2 started appearing, it became clear that they needed others to make good games based on their engines. They fully realized this when they made Quake 3, but failed to remember while making Doom 3 obviously.
I played Doom 3 for a couple weeks and I did love the scare factor. There were a couple moments that had me so creeped out I had to stop playing for a while. But in the end, most of the creepiness is something you get immune to by the end. So it has little if any replay value. "Oh yeah, this is the part where I step on the pentacle and the screen goes red, and I hear screams of, 'we took your 50 dollars muahahahaha', can be heard."
I think the big problem with most FPS games these days is that the story that goes into them always feels like a lame excuse to kill crap. You run into each bigger and badder boss of some level and you get some new uber weapon to kill him with. There's a story, but it's only to give some sense of logic to all these things you have to shoot.
Frankly, until the technology's evolution rate slows down, we'll have to deal with this crap. I mean, can somebody tell me what the plot is of far cry? I have no idea, I just know it has really realistic looking water. When the technology evolves to become more of a story telling medium than an R&D lab for rendering techniques, we may have something. Doom seems to forshadow that a bit, having effectivley ignored the multiplayer element in favor of atmospherics, etc, but it still seems too interested in graphics rendering navel gazing. In the meantime, the FPS genre will make up for it's utter lack of creativity by networking us so we can kill eachother and drool over the special effects wizardry.
Frankly the only game that I've seen recently that I thought was genuinely innovative was PlanetSide. I've been playing it for two years now and it's still way better than anything else out there. It's not that pretty and it's a massive resource hog, but it really is a good demonstration of where this goes. It falls a bit short, but it at least gives you a grander sense of some point to the fighting.
On most games, you fight a round and you kill, capture flags, etc, then the round ends and you start over. PlanetSide does get to feeling like a hampster wheel after a while because there is no win condition, but there's at least a larger sense of the battle always going on and that your contribution to it does have an influence. I think what comes after it should be really interesting, but we'll have to wait and see.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I take it that you have some significant experience in non-realtime rendering, but it doesn't sound like you have much experience with game engines and how level designers use them.
Precomputed light maps do indeed have to do with the choice of engine, because the engine takes care of computing the lightmaps for you. Halflife 2 for instance, supports normal mapped radiosity calculations, in which the diffuse lighting components are added along different vectors during compilation, and then dotted with the normal map during the rendering. "Level designers" don't store them in textures, the compile tools that are associated with the engine do, and the engine takes care of displaying them appropriately.
Having precomputed lightmaps in the doom 3 engine would break all the internal consistency of the lighting. Mobile lights in engines based on precomputed lighting are treated differently from static lights. Doom 3 doesn't have this distinction.
The doom 3 approach allows lights to be much more dynamic, but when a light is that dynamic, you can't have precomputed light maps. You wouldn't have any way of updating them to reflect changing light conditions. Every time an imp warps in, all the lights dim. This couldn't be done realistically with precomputed light maps.
Adding precomputed light maps would require redoing all the internal assumptions about lights in the engine, and you would be basically writing your own.
It's a great book, but I take issue with the author's weapons advice.
.223 Remington (AR-15/M-16 ammo, aka 5.56). And its ammo also is notoriously ineffective at any range.
.30-06, 30-30, .270, .243) that are likely to be easily found at sporting goods stores and other places where you'd be scrounging for anything.
.223 Remington and the AK-47. An AR-15 based weapon has a ton of existing ammo (and compatibility with military weapons), is accurate and ideally powered for head shots at ranges most people can be accurate at.
.50 M2, Russian 12.7mm) would be excellent at stopping mid-sized mobs of zombies or clearing paths for armored vehicles to pass through. Even though only head shots are killers, a single .50 cal bullet will easily cut several zombies in half. Massed fire on a narrow field of zombies could grind them into a much less threatening mess.
Disparaging pistols and shotguns because they're close range weapons makes and promoting the epitome of close-range weapons, a blade, makes no sense.
I also think that the M1 carbine is a terrible choice for a weapon
While it might be cheap (or was cheap in surplus form at one time), the ammo would be nowhere as easy to come by as
The best weapon is likely to be civilian sporting weapons, if only for the widely available ammunition. 12 guage shotgun shells capable of blowing a head off at 25 yards could be found anywhere. There's also a half-dozen hunting rounds (.308,
The best rifle choices are likely to be M4-style AR-15s in
I think AKs tend to be less accurate, but they're also dead reliable, even when full of mud or rust. Ammo availability would be good, but not what the AR-15 clones would have in the US. Outside the US, the AK would be a no-brainer.
The author is mostly right about machine guns, but I have to believe that in some limited situations, a high volume of fire from a large-caliber gun (US
Handguns are more effective than the author claims, despite the difficulty in getting headshots outside of 35 feet or so. At panic ranges a handgun is indispensable and its size makes carrying as a backup a no-brainer.
Many hunting pistols (mostly 6" barrel revolvers) would be decent with scopes at ranges up to 150 feet and be more maneuverable than any rifle, and the ammo is everywhere.
Reading all of this material about zombies makes me wish that they existed to provide a bit of sport!
Anyone who hasn't seen Shaun of the Dead, check it out -- quite amusing.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
with apologies to Mr Don McLean;
A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How those zombies used to make me smile.
And I knew if they had a chance
That they would make me crap my pants,
And, maybe, I'd be happy for a while.
But february made me shiver
With every copy Id delivered.
Bad news on the Usenets;
What happened to my killfests?
I can't remember if I cried
When a zombie took me from behind,
I checked that fucking room ten times,
The day that Id died.
So bye-bye, Mr Developer guy,
My new system isn't ready,
So the frame rates are dry.
Those good old boys were enjoying Far Cry,
Singing "in this game, give a headshot, they die",
In this game give a headshot, they die.
Did you get the flashlight mod,
Cause your character's a dumbass sod,
Has to always let one go?
Do you believe these zombies spawn,
Repetition, boy it makes you yawn,
And can you teach me how to save and load?
Well, I know I put a bullet in him,
It went in right above his chin,
But you need five more to use,
And that means that you lose,
I was a lonely teenage fraggin' fuck
With a with a pr0n collection of Kirsten Kreuk,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day that Id died.
I started singin',
"bye-bye, Mr Developer guy."
My new system isn't ready,
So the frame rates are dry.
Those good old boys were enjoying Far Cry,
Singing "in this game, give a headshot, they die",
In this game give a headshot, they die.