Wicked atmosphere part-aliens/part-The Thing. 10/10 for that, the score and sound effects. Some areas looked really damn cool, especially in the first half of the game when you first go up the mountain, or leaving the base for the first time, or finding the hidden original colony base.

8/10 story, which is a prequel to the first 2 games.

Everything else is not so good though. Gets lots of comparisons to Deep Space, which it is similar to. Main cons are:

� Upgrades are all useless as I only use one gun for most of the game
� Walking around in your stupid robot suit is slow as hell, takes forever and far too much of the game. Even on foot, your character is plodding snail. Deadspace and Bioshock caused this!
� Apart from the last level, the entire last 1/3 of the game takes place in areas you've already fucking played. All linear environments so it's not like a sandbox type of thing. So lazy.
� Keyboard mapping is a mess. You'll have almost the entire keyboard mapped out. The developers could have done a much better job in this area.
� QTE boss battles. I've never seen entire boss battles just be a giant QTE. It's terrible. Most were pretty easy, one was a total cunt.
� Shoot the glowing orange part of the enemy, type of combat. Honestly.

I did enjoy the game because of the design aesthetics, but it does feel like the developers bowed out in the last part of the game. Even the human enemies that finally show up for you to kill (instead of insects) have non-existant AI and just stand there getting shot at.

Overall, despite all those cons, I think 7/10. I'm a sucker for a good unique, creepy atmosphere. 

I'm on the fifth level "The Cruncher".
When I enter the large second hall all enemies are on different height.
I can't shoot them as my aim is straight on.
There's no way for +mlook in Doom2.

How does this work?
Using a joystick in stead of a keyboard? 

doom has vertical auto-aim, i thought. 

Doom 2 has vertical autoaim, so just line them up horizontally.

You might want to also try the ZDoom engine as it lets you look up and down a bit, which is cosmetic, but makes it feels less shite when you come to it from Quake. 

My favorite doom source port is http://zandronum.com/

Modern doom ports all have mouse look and the ability to disable autoaim. In Brutal Doom you'll even have to aim verticallly and there also are headshots :D

I'd also suggest zandronum because it comes with doomseeker which in turn comes with wadseeker. This combination makes for hours of crazy fun. Doomseeker is a multiplayer server browser (there are always people playing) and wadseeker is a tool that autodownloads wads/mods when you want to connect to a server that has things that you don't.

I've discovered some crazy mods this way (Big round bagels hunting down marines ?!?).

However I have the most fun on these massive coop maps where 10+ players face off against hordes of enemies. 

Yeah Doom 2 works perfectly fine without vertical mouselook, however it can also be fun with it (and maybe less disorienting if you're used to Quake). One thing I'd say about mouselook is that in ZDoom there is some weird warping when you look up and down. If that makes you uncomfortable then GZDoom is a better choice -- it handles vertical mouselook as well as (for example) Quake does.

Some people really badmouth GZDoom for having texture-filtering and odd lighting. That's true for its default settings, but you can go into the menus and set "Doom" style sector lighting, and turn off texture filtering. It's still not *exactly* the same as Doom but it's pretty close, and good enough if you really want to be able to vertical-mouselook without getting barfy from the world warping.

(All that being said, I'm kind of on a mouselook-less Doom kick these days, using Crispy Doom or Doom Retro.) 

I'm on lower ground and I can't see a way to shoot the imps up. 

It's 2D, you just have to aim horizontally 

No need to aim up, just shoot them and the bullets will go up... Also try not using the super shotgun for that kind of distance. 

If I aim straight foreward the white bullit flash ends upon 16 units under the imps. So I get killed every time because I can't shoot the same height.

Indeed it is 2D, but in the video it is aiming up and down, so how does they do it? 

The guy in the video is using a sourceport. See the posts above from Kinn, flp, and me. 

Damn, I'd have used GZDoom for my recent playthru rather than ZDoom if I knew it didn't have the lookwarp. 

That dzdoom is terrefic, that's the mouselook I searched.
Thanks for the hint! 

The options menus is fairly extensive, a quick perusal will dismiss most complaints.

This was played with gzdoom. It doesn't look 100% vanilla but it's not nearly as bad as its detractors make it out to be. The mouselook is good. Turning and mouselook speed are a bit weird, though. You may need to drop the latter a hair if it feels off. 

How did they get the smooth weapon animations? 

My guess would be that someone drew some extra frames. 

If you want smooth animations then I recommend getting Smooth Doom. 

improved PerK's smooth animations (this version is tweaked for compatibility with the following mod)

minor sprite fixing project 

I finally got to playing Dark Souls 1.

+pros

Amazing level design. The interconnectivity, although you have to watch youtube videos for some parts to figure out how it's connected, is fantastic.
Some of the areas of Dark Souls are so fucking huge you just gotta stand and look. First entering Anor Londo, Ash Lake, Blighttown Swamps... awesome.

Monster design, visually these were some crazy looking enemies. Some looked fantastic, creepy. The bosses in particular. Probably the giant flying horse thing was the coolest, and the big ass butterfly boss. Best bosses in a video game ever? (visually).

The way the RPG upgrading worked was all pretty good. The right amount of weapons and armour, no inventory limit, nice way of upgrading your skills and weapons. That was all pretty good.

+cons

Shambler I notice you gave up on installing this a couple years ago. Well, you gave up early, GFWL was the easy part. Downloading and trying to setup all the unintuitive mods, changing the awkward controls (glovepie required), finding that alt-tab freezes the game so you have to play in windowed mode but that only works for a while until suddenly the cursor jumps in front of the game and makes it unplayable so you have to restart. The PC port is a piece of shit.

This is a game for a small niche set of players. The type that don't want to have a friendly game of tennis with their buddy, they'd rather have a match with Roger Federer and repeat the match over and over again until they beat him by learning all his moves and countering them the perfect way. All the while your playing with barbed wire wrapped around your feet. It's a game for people that enjoy being tortured because they know when the torture is over, it'll give them a huge sense of satisfaction. I am not one of those people.

I think the difficulty possibly hurt the game because while it does have an avid cult fanbase that rate the game very highly, and even gaming reviewers give it great scores, this is a small fanbase and the average gamer would never continue to the finish of this game. All the praise that's heaped on is by this cult fanbase. Even if you play almost every part of it, it's only about a 25 hour game but the average main story playtime is 50hrs. That's because you have to replay so much of it.

For me, the #1 issue is the checkpoints. A DS fan will argue that the checkpoints are perfect, but fuck that they're terrible. This is what made the game so frustrating for me. While you may die a lot, I can live with that. What I can't live with is repeating up to half an hour of gameplay getting back to where I was with all the enemies respawned. I think in the first 7-8 hours of the game I'd only found 3-4 checkpoints. Everytime I fell off a ledge in fucking Bighttown it was a 10 min sprint from Undead Parish > Lower Undead Burg > The Depths > Blighttown (with godmode on of course because there's no fucking way I'm repeating all that again). Maybe 40% of this game is running from checkpoints after you've died. That's no good. Also the checkpoints are often hard to find, or hidden. I have to consult the walkthrough just to find the damn things.

I think part of the difficulty is due to the PC controls. Not only are they just not suited to kb/m, but they're really, extremely unresponsive. In a game where response time is everything. Sometimes I'd be mashing the roll key and I counted three times before it would actually roll. I'd still be doing my swinging animation meanwhile the enemy has already ran around me and is hitting me from behind before the controls can react, and now I'm on the floor in an incredibly slow fallen over routine. Maybe this is why the PC version is so difficult, and the console version doesn't suffer from the unresponsive controls so much. Maybe no one ever actually plays the PC version, except me.

As such, I godmoded most of the game. Even then it was still a challenge not to fall off ledges. The Lost Izalith boss would be in the my top 20 worst bosses ever. And I still had to use equipment properly because I'm not going to spend an eternity wacking at enemies because I'm using useless weapons.

Also, the game engine is dated. Get up too close to textures and they look a bit shit at times, very bland details and straight box corridors. But that's pretty minor because the scale of the world is mostly fantastic and there's a lot of architectural detail.

Finally... a fantasy RPG with no story, just some tiny lore you have to really dig in to (apparently), to figure out?

No map also becomes a real pain in the ass. I got lost a number of times, and often had to consult a walkthrough. The lack of a map (and waypoints and mission objectives) are all part of the "challenge". The developer trying to annoy the fuck out of the player is also part of the challenge. 

Shit I hit the character limit...


Overall I can't help but think that perhaps this franchise could have been even bigger if it was a bit more accessible to the general gamer. Looking at sales figures, it did 3mill. Dragon Age Origins did 4.75mill. Skyrim... 19mill. It sold okay. But how many gamers were put off by it, because Darks Souls 2 didn't do as well. Who's even heard of their next game, Bloodborne?

I'd only recommend to gamers that like a really tough game and have many hours to sink into it. 

 

haha czg did you love the bit where i said "I godmoded most of the game" :P 

You said "Who's even heard of their next game, Bloodborne?"
Uh... everyone? And it sold 2mil (which is quite good for a platform exclusive, higher than expected anyways).

It's good that there are still people making niche games.