Dream of Waking

Unlike a lot of people, I really enjoyed Doom 3. It’s a big departure from the first two in terms of atmosphere and gameplay, but it holds its own and looks good. I’m doing what feels like my yearly replay of it, except on Veteran (hard) difficulty and I feel like the increased difficulty is really exposing some of the less obvious flaws in the game. I may not even finish this playthrough.

Half of the enemies jump out of closets. It’s one of those obvious flaws that you learn about in the first 15 minutes of the game. On medium, it’s no big deal because you take a hit, turn around, pop them, and they die. On hard, you still take that first hit, and it’s always at least 15% of your health. So you can take two paths with it; you can keep rolling and slowly bleed out from repeated monster closets, or you can quick save after every fight and reload when you find a monster closet so you can better deal with it. It sucks.

Lost souls are the fucking worst. They were an annoyance in Doom 1/2 but never a real threat. In Doom 3, they’re tiny, they hit for at least 15%, they bounce out of the way if you hit them without killing them, and when they hit, your view moves. I died in the first encounter with lost souls. LOST SOULS. Flying, screaming skulls pecked me to death.

The shotgun, which sucks at any range beyond 1 meter in front of you, is the best weapon to kill them with because it’ll almost always kill them in one hit, except you have to wait until it’s charging at you and it’s right in front of your goddamned face before you can think about pulling the trigger. The shotgun only holds 8 rounds, and it takes forever to reload so you better not miss!

And let’s talk about how much the shotgun blows. The shotgun in Doom 1/2 is one of my favorite weapons. It is versatile and possesses a good amount of stopping power. The shotgun in Doom 3 is worthless beyond 1 meter ahead of you. If you are not jamming that shotgun into the bad guy’s face before you pull the trigger, you’re going to have to shoot them twice. That said, it will kill ims, soldiers, zombies, maggots, and those dumb teleporting things  in one shot, so what I’ve found myself doing is dancing around while they shoot at me, and then charging at them before I blast them in the face, then running backwards in case that first shot didn’t do the trick. It’s a huge letdown. It’s horrible. Thankfully the plasma rifle is even more awesome than it was in Doom 1/2.

Even playing on hard, Doom 3 is no more difficult. It is just more annoying. Playing it feels like work. I will probably abort this playthrough, and remind myself next time to play it on medium again, when the game is more fun.

This week I turned in the paperwork that will bump the end of my enlistment up to January 8th. Provided it gets signed, and I’ve been assured a number of times that it will be, I’ll be out of the Army in less than 90 days.

Two weeks ago I blew the rest of my Amazon trade-in credit on five new games. I got F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (PC) (obviously), Far Cry 2 (PC), TimeShift (PC), Red Faction Guerilla (X360), and Dead Space (X360). I’ve given them all a shake to see which I’m more interested in, ended up playing all the way through F.E.A.R. 2. I’m playing Dead Space a chapter at a time, which has been about 45 minutes to an hour of gameplay at a time.

I’m absolutely struggling to bring myself to finish TimeShift. I’m probably three levels from the end now and it is so mediocre that it hurts. I knew it wasn’t a great game to begin with but I had some hopes that it’d take the time suit in some interesting directions. Nope.

Katie and I have been doing some cleanup and repairs to the house to get it ready to sell. Selling the house is the biggest question mark in the entire shift from Army to school. A lot of our plans hinge on it going well, so many that it makes me nervous to have such a single point of failure. What’s worse is I can’t wrap my mind around anything else that could be done to alleviate our burdens if selling the house doesn’t go well.

In less depressing news, I sincerely can not wait until I get to school. There are so many things I want to do there and so many things to look forward to. I may have fucked up my first college run something fierce but I’ll be damned if it goes anywhere near that bad this time.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=207880

This game sounds godfuckingawful. As a fan of Inferno, I think this game is the equivalent of spitting Dante’s corpse and roasting it over an open fire to be served to the masses. Seriously, aren’t there enough third person action games and properties more well suited to this genre than Inferno?

Not that the game will be accurate to the book in any manner but I can’t wait to see how many mouths Satan has grown now. I bet there’s a sweet boss fight waiting at the bottom too.

It’s not because I’m home. It’s because of Never-Ending Video Game Trivia. Look me up. I can’t get enough video game trivia. I stay in the top 50 in rankings and I’m easily in the top 5 of questions answered. I know a lot of the answers and the ones I don’t know, I guess. Sometimes I learn something awesome about a game I’ve played and sometimes I learn some trivial shit from a game only one person has ever played (I’M LOOKING AT YOU ROBOTICA AND PRINCESS DEBUT) but this never ceases to kill a ton of time.