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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."
This guy goes all the way back to Doom. It's almost as if he was, you know, in his mid-twenties!
I admit I am a carmack fanboi but damn that's how good doom was. It didn't need a story. It didn't need a manual even. Heck it didn't even need a mouse. There's also the important open source aspect of the game that gamers can create their own WADs which later turned into an integral part and the games themselves in Quake TF, and for the real CS:S and TF2. All because of doom.
Doom isn't a game, it's an attitude.
A lesser extent Duke Nukem? That game was writing gold. I shed a tear as the main protagonist (Duke) said it was time to "Kick ass and chew bubblegum.... But I'm all out of gum". It felt like it was a commentary on the human condition; "It is time to do 2 things, but I can only resonably do one of them right now"
Without Duke Nukems thick layer of metaphors and social commentary, Kojima would never have been inspired to make Metal Gear Solid.
Doom's gameplay is very fun, and there are only few modern games that are similar to it. The original Serious Sam games were similar. Games with good stories are good, but games like Doom are too. Does every game need to have a story? A movie or a fiction book without story, that is bad. But for a game it shouldn't be a negative criticism if it doesn't have one. Depending on the style and purpose of the game, just being fun is enough. Many modern games feel too heavy and slow paced to match the fun of fragging monsters seen in Doom.
For the last 5 years the evolution in mainstream PC gaming has been all around fancy new graphics.
The only new original gaming style that poped-up was MMORPGs (not really new, but it did became mass-market in the meanwhile).
[This point was really hammered down for me when "Supreme Commander", highly hailed as innovative, came out and it turns out it's an almost 1-to-1 copy of the old "Total Annihilation" from 10 years ago only with better graphics]
The other grand "evolutions" have been the not releasing of demos anymore, the crazy DRM + phone home features, the rise of the "major game publisher" and the death of the small independent software house.
"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."
Nonsense. Doom wasn't supposed to be story-driven game, it was an action game. You grabbed your minigun, charged into a room you'd never seen before and blasted away. You even had a chance of surviving. There are no story lessons from Doom because there weren't supposed to me.
It's exactly the lack of immediate mindless action that's put me off gaming for a long time after. I want gaming, not cinematic experiences. If you prefer cinema that's fine and there's room for both, but for me all the plot-driven stuff is a turn-off. I still want to grab a minigun and charge into a room blasting widly in a totally unrealistic fashion as strange creatures fall in front of me. Shortly before being overwhelmed by ridiculous odds, of course.
When I do play acrade games, I tend to head MAMEwards. Plot-driven stuff just doesn't do it for me at all - if it does for you then that's fine and I'm certainly not criticising it, I'm just saying there's more than one type of gamer and Doom appealed to me in a way that almost none of the other FPS stuff has. That's precisely because it has little story or plot.
Cheers,
Ian
PONG didn't have a story line either, and what's good enough for PONG is good enough for me!
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!
From that link:
"The stats are based on retail sales. Online game subscriptions and digital distribution are not included. And that online gaming market is increasing rapidly, especially with PC gamers."
Just look at here:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/20/develop-09-is-digital-distribution-the-pc-saviour/
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Spring is buggy as hell. I reported several bugs on the forums, and I got
* denial
* accusations
* "if you aren't using Ubuntu, you have no right to complain that it doesn't work in your distro"
* "if you don't like the manual, change it yourself, it's a wiki." Except that it is buggy and that the devs are pretenious pricks, I don't know anything that I could add to the wiki.
Spring is not worth anyone's time.
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