'The mod was praised by John Romero, who jokingly said that if Id Software had released the original Doom with the features of Brutal Doom, they would have “destroyed the gaming industry” ’
Not sure what you mean by 360? Vertically?
There was a Berserk powerup which allowed you to beat the demons with your fists. And the chainsaw was awesome.
The secret level in Episode 2 (E2M9) had you starting off in the centre of an 8-cogged gear wheel, with Barons and loot in 7 of the cogs. The 8th cog had a door, behind which were Cacodemons. The trick was to activate the Barons which would follow you, run through the door, and run around the Cacodemons until the two types started fighting each other at which point you grabbed the loot and killed the remaining demons.
Wow. That was 25 years ago and I still remember it.
Technically, it was possible to punch a demon to death normally, because you could walk up, punch it, and walk back out of range before its bite attack would hit you. It took forever to kill them because they had a lot of HP and punches didn’t do much damage, so it was only a “good idea” under very limited circumstances.
I stand by my assessment that melee was very rarely if ever a good idea. Just something fun to do.
It’s a somewhat more tedious version of killing an Imp with a handgun: Shoot the Imp, then move to dodge its fireball, shoot the Imp again, and keep moving. Iterate that a few times and you’ve invented the circle-strafe, and that kind of run-and-gun dynamic is one of the things which separates Doom from modern FPSes, where cover is vital because you can’t outmaneuver a hitscan* ranged attack but, unlike in Doom, you can regenerate health simply by not getting damaged for a while.
Doom is a kinetic universe where all is in motion, the Doomguy most of all, and staying put means death, whereas in modern FPSes, being a sniper is typically the best strategy.
*(‘Hitscan’ means the game determines whether something hit you by instantly scanning a line outwards from the (notional) barrel of the gun which just fired. If the line intersects your hit box, you got hit, and you take damage. It makes rifles a bit more like lasers, with the modification that the game will use a PRNG to deflect the line a bit so it isn’t too much like a laser.
The alternative is having a projectile object in the game universe, where a rocket launcher, when fired, creates a rocket entity which the game proceeds to move in whatever way rockets move in that game. The rocket can be seen, and, since it moves at a finite speed, dodged. Or, dodged if you’re Doomguy and run at highway speed or faster for the whole game.
Doom uses both types: Hitscan for guns, like handguns and chainguns and shotguns, and projectiles for everything else, including all of the really damaging weapons, with the exception of the BFG 9000, which simply marks everything in a specific cone as having been “hit” and then assesses damage a specified time later, such that even enemies which since moved out of the cone get damaged.)
That’s my style, too, and I still managed to make it through.
And the chainsaw was also good for a few places where a door opened up with an enemy right behind it, and for cacodemons (the big floating eyeballs that shot purple fireballs) as long as you only had one at a time. Most monsters, when they took damage, where incapacitated for a short time, which was longer than the time between chainsaw (or chaingun or plasma gun) damage ticks, so you could stunlock them to death with one of those weapons.
Yeah, one of the semi-official Doom wads had a level where among other things one room suddenly loosed a stupendous number of Demons (the bull-things), but if you were ready for it there was narrow corridor you could back into and take them out one by one with the chainsaw.
And I also apologize because I didn’t mean to imply that I thought you did. I was just also reminiscing about the days when video games were really hard and what we had to do to beat them.
As a side note, that style of play was apparently enough of a hit that they deliberately re-created it for Doom 4. If you stand still, or try to stay behind cover, you’ll get murdered.
Oddly enough, that (and the sequel Pandora Tomorrow) are one of the few games that have kept me interested enough to actually finish. (Since the end of high school, I’ve just not been able to immerse myself in very many games. I wish I could, but for some reason, I just can’t get into that obsessive, immersive mindset I used to be able to.)
I wasn’t into Doom and other first-person shooters (not a genre I enjoy if it’s just a run and gun shoot-em-up), but it was huge freshman year of college (When it came out–late '93/early '94) and I saw a couple obsessive dorm mates beat it without cheat codes in the default difficulty mode (3, Hurt Me Plenty.)
But games have definitely become a lot less challenging, and more “interactive movies” than anything else, I think. Like I alluded to above, since high school, I’m a very casual gamer. But I’ve not encountered anything “Nintendo hard” anymore. I had to be an obsessive to beat games like Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, and Punch Out, but now, I could just play every couple of days and, as long as I have the patience, play through most any game. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just different.
Did anyone else use the M-16 wad?
A marine sergeant designed a wad that featured real weapons, but soon disintegrated into shooting sergeants with chain guns.
Playing network doom with me ex wife, the safest place was behind her. She would begin shooting, and then aim.
I could get to the end of Doom in Hurt Me Plenty, but the only way I could beat Doom II and shoot the designer in the head was in God mode. In any other mode, I was blown off the elevator.
GMANCANADA, were I you I would introduce your son to a game called* I Want To Be The Guy*. As a humbling experience, but also for the lulz.
… and this is where the Nintendo Hard games are now: Indie games, made by indie devs, with nobody to please but themselves and their fans.
AAA games, the big-budget productions of the gaming world, are an industry, and, like any industry, have to make a return on investment or a lot of people lose their jobs. Indie games can be weird art pieces, like That Dragon, Cancer (about a dev’s experience with their child having cancer), or formalist experiments, like Braid (where rewinding the game is a core mechanic), or meditations on ethical issues, like Papers, Please (where the player is a border guard in a totalitarian state), or, yes, ultra-hard platformers with little or no concession to “fun” unless you’re the kind of person who thinks dying in a thousand difficult-to-avoid ways is fun, like I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game or Kaizo Mario World, a series of three ROM hacks of Super Mario World which all turn up the difficulty to deeply unfair levels.
None of those games would be sold at GameStop, to the extent GameStop still sells games, but selling computer games in physical stores was a brief anomaly anyway. Indie games are more “real”, in a sense, than indie movies are, because movies are an inherently collaborative experience, so despite the fact cameras and editing setups are cheaper than ever, most indie films still have a Clerks/Slacker vibe to them because they’re not using “real” actors because acting talent is inherently scarce: even if you, the director, are as skilled and as talented as they come, the final product is as strong as its weakest piece. However, a real game can be made by one person, alone, with no weak links, if the person is skilled and talented and pragmatic enough.
To some extent. But much like indie films turn out Clerks but rarely Guardians of the Galaxy ; a handful of guys hammering on a video game in their spare time aren’t going to produce the kind of impressive graphics of AAA games like the new* God of War* or the least impressive Assassin’s Creed.
I’m not sure that games really have become that much easier either. Recently you can witness the huge success of the likes of Dark Souls of course, but even before that and in a similar genre the first *Devil May Cry *was a bitch and a half to finish for instance. *Doom *was tough, and Call of Duty isn’t (World at War excepted), but the STALKER games can spank you hard, as can some of the *Rainbow Six *games albeit for different reasons. I haven’t had the pleasure of playing the recent *Doom *remake because I’m getting too old for this twitchy shit ; but from what I understand it’s also pretty punishing on the higher difficulties.
But even if we accept the premise that video games have become easier compared to the Nintendo Hard games (and I dare anyone, anywhere to say they have finished Crocodile Dundee on the NES) I’m not sure to which extent this is a byproduct of the industry trying to mainstream itself rather than an evolution of gaming platforms themselves.
The hardest, most fuck-this-bullshit games on the NES or SNES - your Ghouls & Ghosts, your Contras, your R-Types - were arcade ports or developed by teams that had worked for a long time on arcade games beforehand ; and arcade games generated money by getting you to Insert Coin To Continue. They had to be punishingly hard while at the same time giving you the hope that if you got good enough you could play a long time for “free” - much like pinball, where a good player could make a quarter last a lot longer than a scrub.
These days you pay all of the money upfront ; there’s no external incentive to make a game particularly easy or hard, only to get moar sales (and thus, in theory, user enjoyment). Compare to, say, the first Legend of Zelda - it was a game dev’d specifically for a home console, and it wasn’t punishingly hard.
For a time there also used to be a market for games that weren’t necessarily hard but had really obscure bullshit and/or secret stuff thrown in, merely so the publishers could move strategy guides. Thanks to GameFAQs and the like, this has also gone the way of the dodo for the most part.
Do you mean Bayou Billy? That and Battletoads are Nintendo Hard gold standards.
I beat both of them easily!
Game Genie
Right, Bayou Billy, that’s the one ! A true testament to the notion that difficulty and fun are separate axes :D. God, I hated every minute of playing that game.
Impossible Mission was beatable on the Commodore 64, but not on the Atari 5200. The Atari port placed a puzzle piece behind an unsearchable object, I believe it was a computer terminal. Without all of the puzzle pieces you cannot win. But the C64 version was beatable, and I know this because I beat it.
As for the Pac-Man kill screen, that was the case with every single 8-bit arcade game of that era, including Donkey Kong.
I had a hand drawn chart in my bedroom detailing the path you had to take through the road sections of that game back when I was 9. It was a pain to beat, but not impossible if you had patience.
The speeder bike section of Battletoads was so much worse: you had to have the same foreknowledge, but lightning quick reflexes: sort of like playing Dance Dance Revolution blindfolded.
Unfortunately they’ve not gone for the mass fratricide.