Baud Attitude

I finished Doom – well, at least, I finished the original episodes – on Friday night.  I’m not sure if you’re supposed to beat it in the way I did, which was to navigate myself so there was a Hell Knight between myself and the final boss.

This meant that, when the final boss shot at me, he hit the Hell Knight instead, and the two of them got into a bit of a squabble.

This kept them both busy while I burned the boss down with BFG9000 fire.

I’m going to file it under “brilliant strategic moves” and not “cheap exploits”, which is what it really feels like, but what the hell.

Anyway, the obvious next game to tackle was Quake.

I’m pretty sure I never beat Quake back when it was new.  I bought it when it came out, of course, because it was the Big New Thing, but this was also right after the Saturn and Playstation were released so I was pretty heavily into console games.  Specifically, I was heavily into buying console games and then not finishing them, but this also distracted me from finishing the PC games I was ignoring in favor of not finishing console games.

I did play an awful lot of multiplayer Quake over the LAN at work, after hours, so it’s not like I didn’t get any use out of it, just not the single player campaign.

Then Quake got put aside in favor of, I dunno, probably Final Fantasy VII or some other console RPG, and then I stopped playing games on the PC entirely, and then when I got back into PC gaming, it looked like absolute ass by comparison. Time has not treated early 3D titles well.

Anyway, people have spent an awful lot of time working on that whole “looks like ass” problem, so I decided that I’d give the single player game another go.

Like Doom, there are all sorts of replacement clients for Quake.  I eventually settled on Dark Places, which has lots of graphical tweaks and supports 1920×1200 resolution.

Dark Places is both an engine replacement and a mod, something I didn’t quite understand at first.  When I started playing it, I couldn’t figure out why I kept regenerating health, and why everything seemed to be dropping nail guns.

While I didn’t have really strong memories of the original game, these both seemed to be…different.

Quake doesn’t have health regeneration, at least not by default, and grunts (are they called grunts in Quake?) should be dropping shotguns instead.

Turns out, I was going a bit too far for what I wanted, which was a game that was as close to the original Quake experience as possible, just prettier.

Running the Dark Places engine WITHOUT dpmod, ripping the music tracks from the original game CD into OGG format, and adding the quake texture replacement pack, lighting, and new item models gave me just that.

Anyway, none of this has had anything to do with the title of this particular entry, so I’ll get to that now.

Back when I bought my PS3, I rented Heavenly Sword to play on it.  I credit a single Penny Arcade comic for giving me all the information necessary to beat the game, and the post talking about that can be found here.

Anyway, when I was looking up information on Quake texture packs and all that, I was reading posts on the quakeone forums, and a user named Baker had what I consider my new Ultimate Quick Strategy Guide as his signature.

I will reproduce this for your education:

Seeing this told two things:

1) I am going to meet a Big Red Guy.
2) To Seriously Inconvenience the Big Red Guy, I need to find some buttons.

These were rather handy things to know in advance, because when I finally DID run in to him, instead of wasting time trying to kill him with bullets, I ran around a bit asking myself helpful button-related questions like “If I were a button, where would I be?”, and wound up Seriously Inconveniencing the Big Red Guy in very short order.

That ended episode 1. Now I get to start episode 2.

Playing through Doom again has been a little odd.

It’s been 13 years since I last played it, and that, particularly considering the new look made possible by source ports and fan-updated textures and models, SHOULD mean that I don’t remember anything.  I mean, how long can a computer game stick with you?

Apparently, at least that long.

It’s not like I can breeze through the levels with my eyes closed, but I have occasional flashbacks: there are some rooms that I walk in to and immediately remember where the secret doors are, and there’s been a few instances of dodging crushing ceilings without knowing why I was doing it.

Oh, yes, and the very beginning of episode 3, where you have a pistol to kill a Cacodemon?  THAT I remembered. I love the first couple of levels in episode 3 for that, starving you of ammo and giving you just enough to fight your way to a little more, then letting you build up reserves slowly…  It’s great, a complete change-up that makes you play cautiously and strategically while you get yourself requipped.  Much abusing of save / reload during the process. 🙂

One thing I’m pretty sure was completely new was finding one of the secret levels.
It’s possible that I’ve done it before and forgotten, but taking an out-of-the way exit and getting dropped into a room with four Hell Knights, followed by a freakin’ ARMY of Cacodemons?  It was just a wee bit of a shock when it happened and I think I’d have remembered it.

Dungeon Siege was starting to frustrate me.

Not for the normal reason that games frustrate me, which is that they’re hard and I’m a wimp.

Honest!

It was more interface issues than anything else, really.

A couple of the frustrations were caused by running it at 1920×1200 resolution.  The game DOES run at that resolution, and I have to give the developers credit for it, but there are a couple of problems with it.

The first problem is that the game doesn’t adjust its aspect ratio to show you more on the left and right when you go widescreen.  Instead, it crops the screen at the top and bottom, which has the effect of a) always feeling uncomfortably zoomed in and b) having to fight the camera to show you things that you know SHOULD be visible, just slightly off the top of the screen.

The other problem is that stuff like your inventory screen and all the text in the game are rendered at a constant pixel size.  This means that fonts designed to be quite readable on a 1024×768 screen are, well, bloody tiny and hard to read on a modern display, and buttons and item icons are kind of hard to select because they’re also bloody tiny.

So, the first thing I did to relieve frustration was to knock the graphics back down all the way to 1024×768, and suddenly the game got, well, it’s fuzzier, because the scaling isn’t quite perfect when you’re talking an LCD display, but it’s also considerably more readable and I can see things I was missing before.

So that solved the display annoyances, but I was left with the control scheme.

Dungeon Siege has a painfully indirect control scheme.  If you want your party to move somewhere, you point at a place on the map and click the button to tell them to go there.  If you want to fight something, you point at the thing you want to fight and click it.  If you want them to open a box, you click the box, and so on.

Camera controls are also, by default, tied to the mouse, which makes for a lot of accidental view spinning and view correction.

The end result is a surprising amount of wrist cramping and mouse finger fatigue, because you’re constantly moving the mouse and clicking.  It’s worse than playing an FPS, because there’s no breaks in the clicking and you’re never just holding the mouse button down.

If the game had implemented keyboard controls for something as basic as movement, this wouldn’t be an issue, but it’s not flexible in that regard.  It’s really the epitome of “Look!  We’re not a console game! We’re a PC game, for real PC gamers!”

I managed to work around the camera issues by turning off the default camera movement and mapping camera controls to the d-pad on my Nostromo n50, then mapping most of the keyboard controls to buttons on the n50, and this worked out really quite well.  Didn’t fix the mouse finger fatigue problem though.

You in the back laughing, yes, I know “mouse finger fatigue” sounds like a silly thing to whine about.

Then I had, in quick succession, two flashes of inspiration.

The first: “Hey, I wonder if there are any programs out there that would let me use a gamepad as a mouse?”

The second: “Hey, I already have the software that came with my Logitech gamepad installed, I wonder if it does that?”

It was rather surprising, but gratifying, to launch said software and have it not only support emulating a mouse, but automatically detect Dungeon Siege and give me a set of predefined actions for the game.

Those guys at Logitech, they’re awfully sharp.

Anyway, using the gamepad is no substitute for the mouse when it comes to stuff like inventory management, because it really isn’t very precise, but for the purposes of moving my party around the game world, killing things, and looting them… it’s working just fine and my frustration level is WAY down.

Oh, and I ditched a dead-weight character and replaced her with a third packmule, and that’s helping too.

The dungeon I’m currently working through has, again, entirely too many spiders, but at least they’re frost spiders and for some reason I don’t mind white, snow-covered spiders nearly as much as green-and-black, ichor-covered spiders.

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.