I’m playing Wolfenstein - The Old Blood currently and have noticed a couple Doom easter eggs so far. Early on you’re riding in a car. If you look at the ignition key the key fob is a Doom rocket launcher. Later on in an officer’s quarters there is a stuffed toy cacodemon.
For me, the original Doom was the superior of the series. In particular, I think original Doom had overall a higher and more consistent achievement in level design. Too many of Doom 2’s levels were just gimmicky, although some of them were fabulous. Also, I didn’t think the new Doom 2 monsters really added all that much to the enjoyment of the game.
I did really like Hexen as well, and Hexen 2 for that matter was really good, quite underrated in my opinion.
As for recent games, I support the enthusiasm for Half-Life 2. While I agree that it is on rails, and sometimes rather repetitive, what really makes that game great is its fantastic atmosphere and superbly designed levels, from the very moment Gordon Freeman arrives in City 17. The story telling is interesting, as is the gathering feeling that the humans are finally starting to turn things around after the wonderfully bleak opening (and, uh, Ravenholm). I find the progress of the story among the most compelling of any FPS I’ve ever played.
The only section I wish had been shorter in that game was the trek on the beach avoiding sand section, but I enjoyed it on the first run.
ETA: I’ll add that I think Doom 3 was also underrated, although admittedly not as great as the first two in the series.
And I’m glad no punk has come in here to this thread to say “Marathon.”
Did you forcefully shove a carving fork inside his throat about Daikatana, and if not why not ?
Wife #2 and I played Doom II with the M-16 patch and as many different wads as we could find. Safest place was directly behind her. 
Another HL2 fan here, I just remember being in awe the first time I walked round a corner and saw a strider walking by. Good sound too.
My favourite FPS however is Battlefield: Vietnam. Massive maps and vehicles that really added something to the game.
I loved Hexen, and Hexen 2 not as much but it was still enjoyable.
Hexen was like a souped up Doom, and it might have been the last big FPS to still use sprites before they changed to 3D polygons. I miss those sprites, there was a difficulty factor and a surrealist aspect that isn’t properly captured with polygons. Even the limited draw distance fog was cool, it made things more enclosed and allowed things to sneak up on you. I think I rebought it on Steam a while ago, but it felt different and there was a lot of lag that I couldn’t figure out how to remove.
I think you’re correct in a lot of the criticism, but HL2 just did the regular FPS stuff so well that you forget about the negatives, at least I did. I never felt too constrained at the on-the-rail pacing because I was having too much fun. And I love story so a game with one is going to get a bump from me over an equally technical game without one.
Comparing it to some other big FPS games I’ve played lately like all 3 Bioshock games, or the new Wolfenstein game, or Dishonored, HL2 just felt more free. Sure, the environments were bigger in the big open sky areas in Bioshock: Infinite, or they were more detailed like in Wolfenstein, or you had more options in how to play like Dishonored, but HL2 threw more things at you and more different gameplay styles.
For example, some people might hate the boat part in HL2, but it was well done and rarely seen in a FPS. There’s the later dune buggy part too where you are tested with different situations. Sometimes you get off your ride and run into a building to open a door, sometimes you have to make a difficult jump, or sometimes you drag a bomb behind you to reach a stalker then use that bomb to blow it up. HL2 threw so many different mechanics at you that you’re never just doing one thing throughout the game. Sometimes you’d be crossing a bridge and a gunship would attack you and you’d have to run for cover, sometimes you use antlions to clear a level, or pick up saw blades to lop off the heads of infected headcrabs. Entire levels played differently
In games like Bioshock or Wolfenstein, you don’t really get that much freedom. You may use your weapon in a slightly different way, but you’re typically not riding a vehicle. And while you get different powers in Bioshock, all enemies must be at least vulnerable to whatever you choose. It would be more akin to HL2 if your path varied a lot more with the powers you get, and I don’t mean just melt down an iced up door for some power ups, I mean like if you choose to get electric plasmids, you go through this building and if you choose fire, you get to go down this path to the boss. Dishonored did that, and I know its a stealth game, but the fighting was so difficult and clunky that I almost wished there was a blow-through-everything-with-unlimited-ammo mode.
What separated Doom and Doom 2 from the rest was the way you could play cleverly and set the monsters against each other. I’ve yet to see that adequately repeated.
I recall a level where you could run like hell around a pool of acid and hide out in a room. Fire off one shot, and the monsters would come out and generally kill each other while you had a smoke. 
Half-life 2 is probably the best FPS, to me, as well. I am not a huge fan of the genre, but that experience was just perfection.
Ah, Hexen. Absolutely loved it.
I don’t consider it a part of the “modern” FPSs because of its age, but I also won’t be surprised if you want to lump it in with them, my favorite is the original Medal of Honor.
I loved the WW2 gameplay, the variety of guns and enemies, the stealthy type missions and the like.
Doom had better level design on the whole, but Doom 2 had better monsters.
I think, as far as purity of gameplay goes, Doom/Doom 2 (let’s be honest, they’re basically the same game, Doom 2 would be an expansion pack by today’s standards) is the best. Tons of enemies, fast movement speed, great level design, and not bogged down by things like “story” or “cutscenes.” 
I like Half-Life 1 a lot too, and it’s probably the only other game I’d even be willing to put in the conversation (Deus Ex, more of a FPS/RPG hybrid, is disqualified). But its heavily set-pieced “cutscene” type design, while awesome at the time, feels very quaint by today’s standards. I never really understood why everyone thought HL2 was the pinnacle of FPSs… it had more awesome setpiece moments, sure, but I always felt the story was pretty weak and covered up by the way they presented it, and many of the enemies and levels failed to stand out.
You can do this in Half-Life with the military and aliens, but there’s very few spots in the game you can do so organically (as opposed to already set up as part of a “cutscene”).
I bought the original Painkiller when it was on a Steam sale for something like $2 and played through the first few levels. It kinda felt like the sort of project someone would make for a high school class - the graphics are fugly and each level seems to be populated by only one type of monster (!) Didn’t really make me want to keep playing more.
Serious Sam, I loved, but I always felt the biggest drawback was the monotonous settings. The entire game is nothing but Egyptian temples, which gets a bit boring after awhile.
Did you play Return to Castle Wolfenstein? That seems to have a lot of the same tricks as well. Also, those missions were spectacular, for many of the missions you could sneak through half of it or go in guns blazing.
I won’t judge anyone’s personal preference, the alien dystopia thing might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but what specifically about the story did you think was weak?
Even if this was about knights and wizards, or a modern war type of a story, I think in terms of things like length, scale, world building, game physics, and the amount of different things they throw at you, HL2 did them better than pretty much any other game. There are lots of stages where you have to go stealth, or defend a specific area, or break into a building while avoiding an unkillable monster, or something else entirely. Most games would have one or two stages like that but HL2 introduced all of them and it fit the world perfectly. That’s what I remember about the story, not for the everyday dialogue, but meeting Dog for the first time, fighting Stalkers by chasing them with a buggy with a bomb on it, the boat sequence, fighting that helicopter thing that drops bombs, hopping across that giant bridge, etc. And of course the ending of Episode 2. I just don’t understand how someone could say the story was weak and the game wasn’t that good when so many things worked
:eek:
Doom 2 basically required a mouse if you didn’t want to get destroyed online. I’m not sure how many people actually played online, but it’s one of my fondest memories of high school.
Mouse proficiency, diagonal running, and silent BFG kills were all staples of early online play.
I blame the rise of the third-person shooter. If you can see you character then you expect your character to move in realistic ways that build on the fantasy of being an elite soldier. It’s important that your character move on screen like the characters you see in cop/war movies. So you have cover systems.
Unfortunately this cinematic/simulation approach to shooter design gets in the way of the maneuver mechanics that made old-school shooters so interesting.
Is that the newest Wolfenstein that came out within the last year or three?
I haven’t played any Wolfie since the original (or was it called 3-D, I think that)
Return to Castle Wolfenstein came out around 15 years ago now, so no. The latest game is Wolfenstein: The New Order, an alternate-history sequel to Return featuring a fully-voiced BJ Blazkowicz who looks remarkably like John Cena for some reason.
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Personally, I wouldn’t count the Doom games in the same genre as modern FPSes (for one, we didn’t even call them FPSes back then; we called them ‘Doom-clones’); I’d say that Deus Ex and/or Deus Ex Human Revolution are the pinnacle of the genre in the way they mesh great gameplay and excellent storytelling.
Setting monsters against each other was also key to many of the boss battles in Doom II. I remember one level that had both a Cyberdemon and a Spider Mastermind, that you had to get to fight each other. On higher difficulties there was also a spot with two Spider Masterminds, as well as a few spots where you could take out a SM with Arachnotrons. Trickier, but rewarding, was to take out an Archvile with friendly fire: On the one hand, the Archvile’s attacks wouldn’t aggro other monsters, but on the other, having an Archvile present guaranteed that there’d always be other things to trick into hitting it (and the Archvile would also eventually kill itself in the process of raising something else).
And I don’t think I ever actually killed a Pain Elemental through any method other than its own Lost Souls.
No, that one, and the just released standalone expansion The New Blood, followed 2009’s Wolfenstein, but all were done way after Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001).
RtCW was great, it was the first reboot of the classic Wolfenstein 3D title and had modern (for its time) graphics, enemies that flanked you and hid in cover, and a similar story to the original Wolfenstein in that you were BJ Blazkowitz and trying to escape from behind enemy lines. 2009’s Wolfenstein was a sequel but they changed up the gameplay, had a hub city, and added RPG elements whereas RtCW was just a straight up FPS
I think out of all the Wolfenstein games, I enjoyed my first playthrough of RtCW the most.
We should at least mention Unreal Tournament - really excellent multiplayer and some early co-op play maps.
How did you manage that? Rockets for the elemental here, and shotgun or chaingun for the lost souls.