This is cruel. It doesn’t have tonedeaf philosophizing or insulting “moral choices”
Reminds me, who here played Quake 4? It’s basically Doom 3 but somehow significantly more lifeless. May be the worst “compotent” game I’ve played because someone looked at Quake and Doom and said “yeah, these are the same thing” which is kinda sorta true except Quake 4 is so identical to Doom 3 that it may as well be an expansion pack.
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Quake 4 has like 18% more shooting and 36% fewer dark rooms which I think is supposed to preserve the “Quake frantic action, Doom more atmospheric” distinction
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Now Quake 4, I liked that one a lot more than Doom 3. I started it a couple times and never finished it either. But I have a soft spot for Raven. I still need to play their 2009 Wolfenstein that the new ones follow on from (look it up if you don’t believe me, the story in the new games is a direct sequel to Wolf 09). Maybe one day they’ll get to make their own games again instead of doing grunt work for Call of Duty.
Quake 4 had that part where you get turned into a Strogg. That was cool. And it had that mobile base zone between levels that you returned to throughout the game. I don’t remember much else about it though. It was as good looking as Doom 3 and a direct sequel to Quake 2. It was scifi and I liked the starter pistol. It’s a shame it didn’t make it onto the backwards compatible list on Xbox. Would have been to nice to see it in 4K.
The multiplayer was fantastic.
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The ios version of Doom is literally the same app I had downloaded years ago before they took it down.
the mid 00’s were truly the dark ages of the fps. just extended tech demos showcasing engine features and no desire or conception of how to design a satisfying game around them.
Battlefield 2 and Unreal 2004 were OK
but as far as single player stuff it’s just a wasteland of no one understanding how they want to copy Valve quite yet until Modern Warfare brought them back into the light
FEAR being pretty much the sole exception… we still hate half life 2 here, right?
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Half-Life 2 was overrated at the time and underrated now.
It’s a well designed tight game that features a bunch of well designed encounters with fun enemy design. I dunno what’s bad about it other than people hailed it as the second coming of games and it wasn’t.
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Don’t make me post about HL2.
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I was going to beg you to so I didn’t have to but I thought better of it.
That fucking hovercraft.
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Quake 4 seemed kinda neat when I tried it. I remember it felt nice to shoot stuff but there was absolutely nothing to compel me to play more than an hour of it. I didn’t even know a Quake 4 existed until its been out for years.
Every Quake after the original has been trash don’t @ me
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HL2 is boring in retrospect because of the poor LD. The large environments during the vehicle segments make fighting the Combine boring compared to soldiers in HL1 and there’s far too many rube goldberg “look what we can do with physics!” bits. Ravenholm is a neat idea but moving down zombies in HL is not fun.
That said I still dig HL1, the Episodes and many of the vanilla-style mods out there like Minerva and Mission Improbable.
Also Raven and Monolith are the greatest FPS devs ever. Star Trek Elite Force has gorgeous brushwork and Singularity is great. And Monolith has FEAR, NOLF, Blood, AvP2, Tron 2.0.
I tried to replay Doom 3 recently and yeah, would have been better if it was way shorter. As it is, it becomes a repetitive slog pretty quickly.
I liked Quake 4 better but also lost interest soon after being stroggified, even though that made the game actually more fun to play. I would play it again, Doom 3 I’m happy not touching. Also the expansion for Doom 3 sucks, don’t believe the hype.
I tend to agree with this. Although my favorite FPS might be the old AvP from Rebellion. But they don’t have as impressive a resume as those two companies. Raven especially was at the top of my list for a long time. Elite Force ruled. One of the very few good Star Trek games. And I’m into Soldier of Fortune, okay? It was a good game, I swear
Monolith will forever be dear to my heart because of NOLF. So rare that games have a great sense of humor
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Ok so…last year I played Elite Force all the way through. The aesthetics were pretty great, but nearly every level overstayed it’s welcome and the back half of the game was really repetitive and filled with super generic arenas fighting generic enemies in generic envriments. The enemy AI is super boring.
Half-Life 2’s constantly changing scenarios, weapon set, and excellent enemy placement kicks it’s ass.
That’s not even getting into my confusion that HL-2’s short fast physics puzzles are somehow apparently worse than the absolutely awful jumping puzzles of Half-Life 1.
And Ravenholm was great. It felt weird and that was a good thing. The constantly changing scenarios in HL-2 are it’s greatest strength. You’re almost never just fighting combine in a boring room, you’re always encountering them in new places and new contexts.
Like…HL-2 is a good shooter. It’s better than most raven games and I love Raven’s stuff. But Raven’s stuff can be really sloggy, and wildly uneven.
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