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A Look At How Far PC Gaming Has Come
Bit-tech is running a feature examining the progress PC games have made over the past couple decades. The article highlights aspects of modern games we often take for granted or nitpick, and compares them to earlier games in which such features were implemented poorly or not at all. Quoting:
"Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom. Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented. On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea what’s going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all — something modern games would get heavily slated for doing. Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D. There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
That line is ripped from John Carpenter's They Live, and some others are taken from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead. Homage or plagiarism? You decide.
Circumcision is child abuse.
MMORPGS came from MUDS in the 1980's which came from tabletop RPG which came from Sci-Fi writers like Paul Anderson's 'psychodrama' stories from the 1950's. The idea being that grown ups act like they are something they are not and interact with each other through roleplaying. That would be an interesting article to read, not some 20 some year old who can't bother to at least Google a bit further back than his comfort zone.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I dunno. You're absolutely right, and yet... I think DOOM! was probably the first time I perceived a PC as a proper gaming machine.
I mean, Wolfenstein was impressive, and in retrospect (I didn't play it much) a great game -- but it was very much a matter of "well, we've got this PC for business apps, I can make it play this game". At that time, if you had games in mind when you bought a computer, you got an Amiga. Or a console.
Prior to DOOM!, most decent PC games were available for Amiga / Atari ST, with better sound and graphics. Wolfenstein looked like a poor Amiga game.
DOOM! though, came out just as VGA was becoming mainstream, and sound cards were becoming available and affordable. Most PCs didn't have a sound card, and you'd add one as an afterthought, often to improve your DOOM! experience. It looked *amazing* in comparison to an Amiga game, and that was a first.
OTOH the article's author should still consider the 25 years of non-PC videogaming heritage leading up to DOOM!.
OK, he lost me there. The entire idea of DOOM was that it was an incredibly technically advanced shoot-em-up. Being able to run around in the levels and shoot realistic-acting guns was great. All that you really had to know was to shoot the demons - the player has no other way to interact with the world other than shooting. Who needs a plot? That always baffled me about the old Japanese Nintendo games...they always had these incredibly convoluted unncessary plots that I read the first few lines of and then forgot it and went on to saving the kingdom or whatever. And I was a manual-reading completist.
When, exactly, did computer game snobs decide it was cool to call DOOM 'rubbish'? What happened to computer game snobs being polygon and FPS guys? What makes this guy look down his nose at something that he doesn't understand and apparently has no desire to understand?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'm sure you've seen it; even played it, but perhaps not enough attention has been given to it yet:
http://www.springrts.com/
The guys started out with the Total Annihilation game, built an open-source implementation of the engine so you could play it with the original game-packs, and then went on to 'generalize' the engine somewhat so that you can create other 'games' for it.
In one word: AWESOME. All that was good with TA (gameplay) and all that is good with modern graphics (3D, shaders, realistic water, nice explosions, deformable terrain.. etc).
Check it out, if you havent yet.
(ofcourse there's linux binaries)
I don't know about that. Sure Doom was nice, but it was the original Quake that had everybody I know crowded around a monitor going "oooh!". From the awesome graphics, to the soundtrack by NiN, to the fricking huge levels with lots of secrets to find, Quake was the one that had all my friends rushing out to buy PCs and Voodoo cards.
So while Doom got many folks to try a PC for the first time, in fact I got my first Intel PC from a guy who had last year's top o' the line P-100MHz and gave it to me for the $150 he owed me because it would only run Doom "stock" and gave him an excuse to get a tricked out gamer rig, It was Quake that had folks running out and shelling out what was serious money at the time for gaming PCs. Hell I would say that Quake and the Voodoo is what created the whole idea of gaming PCs, as a stock business rig just wouldn't give you the "oooh!" factor in that game.
And look at how far we progressed thanks to everyone wanting the "oooh!" factor. In a five year period I went from that P-100 to a P233Mhz, a PII-400MHz, a P3-650Mhz, a P3-733Mhz, to a P3-1100Mhz which I still keep around as a Nettop. Lets be honest-Windows and the office apps of the day certainly didn't use anywhere near that much juice, and even today that 1100Mhz with Win2K and MS Office 2K makes a good little Net appliance, but of course if you want to game it just don't cut it, hence the dual core AMD with 8Gb of RAM and another 1Gb on the GPU I have for gaming. And that can all be traced back to Quake, which even today is still damned fun to break out. While Doom may have implanted the idea of 3D gaming in the heads of the masses, I would argue that Quake drove that idea home with all the power of a nailgun and made it a "must have" for the masses.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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