Chocolate Doom can’t do limit-removing / BOOM maps, which that neon-esque megawad he wants to play seems to be.
Best option for authenticity + limit-removing is prBoom-plus, but that requires some tinkering to use comfortably.
I’d say just use zDoom and call it a day.
Don’t do anything OpenGL.
Don’t use Skulltag / Zandronum.
Play Thy Flesh Consumed and No Rest for the Living.
song titles are silly (RIP AND TEAR) but the music seems fine to me? As long as it’s steadily playing background music (is it?) it’s not our modern sound-effects driven soundscapes
“Rip and tear” is literally the opening line of dialogue.
Redboxing this a minute after midnight for the weekend haul.
Won’t get enough practice for the Hitman Elusive Target, but that’s aight.
Cautious hype. Two and a half hours.
I’m pleased to report that you can disable all the AAA bullshit and have nothing appear on-screen except your health and ammo.
I’m surprised to report that this game is its own thing, and it owns, and it wastes virtually zero time getting into the genocide.
Doomguy does not speak and reacts violently to that which does.
You can select up to 110 FOV on console. Default is 90. Aiming is perfect.
The melee button doubles as the contextual use button (I love this).
You don’t have legs so you can’t post(ure) on Internet forums about how novel and cozy and “body presence” bla bla bla you slide around and it’s DOOM. It’s as fast as it can and ought to be. If you need legs don’t play this. (CoD has legs now so I hope / expect that stops being a talking point soon.)
The loading screens (on death) are blank and bland and have inexplicably verbose tips, and last just a few seconds too long. This so far the main negative of the game.
The BFG and Chainsaw are not on the weapon wheel. They are bound to Square and Triangle. They are that important.
More later.
The level design: Not classic, not Quake, but a helluva lot better than Serious Sam and absolutely not tedious as it initially seemed.
The wombs you’ve seen that trigger locked arena wave skirmishes are few and far between. For the most part, enemies are already just there in the areas, they belong there, they fill the space and the game does everything it can to encourage you to use all the space too. Once you’ve used up that space and used up all the enemies (the best way to recover is to do Glory Kills as frequently as possible, more on that later), you move on. It does not teleport in new enemies or pop open closets after crossing invisible tripwires.
It’s totally linear but the combat arenas are wide and vertical (much clambering) and interesting enough to make me not bothered by that, and there’s a decent degree of exploration between them, and because the enemies are always already there it doesn’t have that pace-stuttering “entering combat” feel. It doesn’t lock the doors behind you except in womb rooms, so you can go back if need be.
There is a gratuitous amount of explosive crates and you will be grateful for them. They only take one shot each. It always perplexed me how sturdy they were in classic DOOM.
Not all secrets are marked as such.
There are no more hitscanners; even the chaingunner bullets are visible and dodgeable.
And this is nice because on Nightmare, which is here not a gimmick difficulty and instead the definitive, you die in like 2 hits. Take one good lick and you’re critical and gotta scavenge in combat for health, or weaken enemies for Glory Kills and extra health pickups. Your enemies are the primary source of replenishment.
The Glory Kills are central and essential to the game flow, not just tacked on Brutal Doom gore-pandering as it had seemed. They give you a brief moment of invulnerability and save you some ammo in a pinch, as well as the bonus health, but there’s a risk involved in the presence of other enemies, so you might not want to get close enough or halt your momentum, or you might want to weaken a group first and finish them all off while they’re still staggered, or maybe you can’t take the time to merely weaken a particular enemy and instead have to unload everywhere with explosives to clear the heat. It adds an interesting set of decisions that accentuates the greater intelligence and threat of individual enemies in this game. You’re still fighting a dozen or more at once, of course.
doesn’t make it not pandering. it just means they knew it was pandering, so they decided to double down.
what basically amounts to in combat regen rather than out of combat regen is a pretty clever answer to the how-do-we-handle-health question, but tying it to GORE KILLS is a sloppy and lame way to implement it. how about just chaining? or some kind of time-spent-in-combat metric
Pretty sure we called it last year that it would be a Space Marine-esque system for replenishing health
I’m okay with systems the promote aggressive play, and there is no more aggressive option than running up to an enemy with who-knows-what going on around you when you can just as easily shoot them dead
The justification for it would be RIP AND TEAR
ah yes, the ideal first person shooter character, 
The ideal FPS character is the floating gun arm and breasts from Trespasser and I won’t have anyone say otherwise
I want someone to make a first person shooter where when you walk in the included bathroom level that has the only mirror in the game, the character reflected is a camera drone holding a gun
I said not just pandering. There’s plenty of pandering to go around in this game, but it’s mostly justified.
Chaining and time-spent-in-combat would be trickier / less satisfying to represent visually / naturally than ripping enemies open for snacks.
I’m just saying legs are no longer really A Thing, so it’s not a thing that they’re not a thing here (and it would be weird given the unnatural speed).
A certain high-profile walking simulator from last year does this.
I love the moment in the very beginning where you’re contacted by the villain but before he even has the opportunity to task you with some shit side quest, Doom Marine smashes the communicator. This was a good middle finger moment to all the other AAA shooters that attempt to saddle you with logical motivation for mass murder.
How could you not love a game with a feminine AI that cautions on the intercom
“DEMONIC PRESENCE AT UNSAFE LEVELS”
Loading screen tip:
“If an enemy has a head, it’s a weak spot.”
The levels do become non-linear starting with the third, and larger than any in the original DOOM. You do spend much of the combat in arenas, but they are internally dense enough to function similar to the OG’s cross-mapping sprees, just scaled down.
The game does expect you to kill all the demons, and I got no problem with that.
[quote=Roger Ebert]“Doom” has one great shot. It comes right at the beginning. It’s the Universal logo. Instead of a spinning Earth with the letters U-N-I-V-E-R-S-A-L rising in the east and centering themselves over Lebanon, Kan., we see the red planet Mars. Then we fly closer to Mars until we see surface details and finally the Olduvai Research Station, helpfully described on the movie’s Web site as “a remote scientific facility on Mars” … where, if you give it but a moment’s thought, all of the scientific facilities are remote.
Anyway, that’s the last we see of the surface of Mars. A lot of readers thought I was crazy for liking “Ghosts of Mars” (2001) and “Red Planet” (2000) and “Total Recall” (1990), but blast it all, at least in those movies, you get to see Mars. I’m a science fiction fan from way back. I go to Mars, I expect to see it. Watching “Doom” is like visiting Vegas and never leaving your hotel room.[/quote]
