Baud Attitude

I hopped on the Doom bandwagon a couple of years late.

When Doom was originally released, I didn’t have a machine at home capable of running it – I had a pieced-together 80286 box that had about enough marbles to boot up and run Qmodem, but that was about it – so I couldn’t really jump on board the craze.

I could have played it at work, because Symantec used to be pretty relaxed about that sort of thing, but we did get an all-company nastygram about it taking down our network with everyone deathmatching at once so I figured it might be better if I didn’t.

It wasn’t until Doom II was released, at just about the same time as my being put on the midnight-to-8 shift, that I got into the whole first-person-shooter thing. My boss gave me a copy so I’d have something to do overnight, and playing it in the wee hours meant that there wasn’t any chance of me overwhelming the network anyway.

I found the mouse controls kind of weird at the time, so I played through the entirety of Doom II using the keyboard, on Hurt Me Plenty or whatever the difficulty was that was just below Nightmare.

It was a good time. I was getting 12 bucks an hour to play Doom II and answer 2 or 3 phone calls a night.

Then I took an expensive step in terms of PC ownership and bought a new machine that could ACTUALLY RUN GAMES, in my case a Pentium 90 with a whopping 2 Megs of RAM.

It was about then that my boss bought, for every member of his team, a copy of “Wing Commander III”… and, because he knew I was an anime fan even if he didn’t know what that meant, he bought me a copy of “Knights of Xentar” as well.

I traded in the Wing Commander III for Dark Forces, and it was Just Like Doom 2 as far as the controls went… and quite a good game, besides.

Then, in 1995, iD released Ultimate Doom, which was the original Doom AND more levels AND sold in retail stores.

And I thought to myself, hey, I should go back and try this thing now that I’ve played through the sequel and a bunch of other Doom Clones.

It was pretty darn good, and I managed to beat all four episodes.

Life wasn’t all golden when it came to PC gaming though.  By this time, my expensive massive Pentium 90 wasn’t so state of the art anymore, and PC gaming in general was in a very confused state.  There were multiple, incompatible, 3D graphics standards, game makers were still in the “you need to make a boot disk to play OUR GAME”, heaven help you if you were running Windows 95… buying a PC game was truly a matter of playing compatibility roulette.

It was easier to buy console games because they would Just Work, so I went pretty much consoles-only when it came to gaming, until Starcraft and Everquest anyway.

That’s how I defend buying the rather lame port of Doom for the Jaguar, which I bought for no logical reason other than to have another Jaguar game that wasn’t Aliens Vs Predator or Tempest 2000.

I didn’t play much of that, mostly I used it to let off steam. I’d go into invulnerable mode, turn on infinite ammo, and walk around maps blowing up stuff at point blank range with the rocket launcher.

After that came Doom64. I plunked down 80 bucks for the cartridge, and another $149 for the N64 to play it on, and 20 bucks for the strategy guide… in retrospect not a great move, but it WAS a great version of Doom.

Then my Dooming kind of went quiescent for a decade.

Doom 3 came out, but I was deep into Everquest and didn’t have a machine that would run it anyway.

And you couldn’t play first person shooters with the keyboard anymore, you HAD to use the mouse.

I’d never gotten the hang of that, so I felt quite locked out of buying recent games. It wasn’t actually until 2005 or so that I buckled down, bought Serious Sam, and forced myself to Get The Whole WASD thing.   Even then, I didn’t REALLY get the hang of it until 2006 when I decided to give Deus Ex a try.

I reinstalled Ultimate Doom at some point with an eye towards having a good old nostalgia fest, and, uh, it was kind of painful. 320×200 resolution graphics have Not Aged Well.

Then I found out about jDoom.

Now I can run Doom in 1920 x 1200, widescreen with a proper FOV, updated 3D models, pretty lighting effects, high res textures… and still the same old “Everything Is Trying To Kill You. Survive.” gameplay.

And that gameplay, THAT has Aged Just Fine.

Oh, and I CAN play it with the mouse now. It just took me 13 years to get the hang of it.

After I finished off the spider-infested temple, and incidentally I will be sending Chris Taylor a bill for the therapy I’m going to need, it was time to tackle the next fantasy standby: The dwarven mine overrun by nasties because the dwarves have been, well, that whole delving too greedily and too deep thing.

At least there wasn’t a balrog.

That didn’t take nearly so long, and it didn’t have any spiders. Scorpions, yes, scorpions a plenty. I don’t have any problems with scorpions.

There were a couple of rooms in it that really made me take notice; Dungeon Siege is an awfully pretty game for something five years old.

I have made at least one tactical flaw in my party makeup, however.

In the very first town you come to, you can get up to three extra party members.

Only one comes along for free, though.  You have to fork over some cash for the other two.

One of them has a doctor’s bill you have to settle and the other one is just so full of himself that he demands cash for his magely services.

As an aside:  I can deal with the guy who’s full of himself.  The chick who got shot with an arrow, though, and wound up with a huge doctor’s bill?

Let me point this out: In Dungeon Siege, healing potions are plentiful, effective, and cheap.  One good chug from one is enough to bring your characters back from death’s door.

The “doctor’s bill” I had to settle would have bought a 12-pack of healing potions, and the NPC who sells the healing potions was standing NEXT to the character with the doctor’s bill.

Anyway, I didn’t have enough money to hire either of them until after I’d ground through the spiders.

So, the characters I DID bring along for Spider Massacre 2008 got a ton of experience, the characters stuck in town DIDN’T get a ton of experience, so they’re much weaker characters than the rest of my party and they die an awful lot.

In addition, the majority of the gear I’m finding has required stats to equip, and these characters aren’t anywhere near the required stats, and can’t GET the stats without leveling. It’s a bit of a paradox, really.

Oh, well, I have the game on “easy” and my biggest logistical problem, apart from finding armor for my two weaker characters, is having enough space to hold all the loot I’m picking up. It’s not like I HAVE to min/max an entire party or anything.

OK, so I don’t really think there are any such things as “Necessary” spiders, at least as far as video game enemies go, but these are particularly bad, not least so because of unfortunate timing.

I have been trying Dungeon Siege. I have heard it referred to as, basically, a prettier Diablo, and, yeah, from the 15 minutes of Diablo I’ve played, Dungeon Siege is kind of a prettier version. Except, you get to have a party instead of just one guy and the world has a little less of an “80s heavy metal music video” vibe.

If that makes any sense.

Anyway, it’s nice because I can pick it up and click things for a half hour or so and feel I’ve progressed and save. I’m not getting any long, uninterrupted periods of time to play games, so this is something I need –  something I can play for a bit without any particular pressure – and it’s been working out.

Until, that is, tonight.

When I went blithely into the dungeon full of freaking spiders.

Before bed.

And I’ve been trying to get through this dungeon full of spiders for, like, 2 and a half hours, and it just keeps throwing more spiders at me and getting progressively more creepy-crawly , and I just want to get through so I can see something that doesn’t have 8 legs.

GAH.

At least it’s not Ravenholm.

Oh, as an aside, I got one of my party members killed and needed to look up how to resurrect her.

I was quite tickled to find out that this is the subject of a Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

Dungeon Siege: How to Resurrect a Dead Character

They need another Knowledge Base article called something like “Dungeon Siege: How to make it so your skin stops crawling after fighting spiders for two hours when you’d really rather be in bed.”