having finally played Doom 3...

it is, of course, beautiful...but it's also unrelentingly dark, the kind of dark where you KNOW things are going to jump out and scare you. From behind. Repeatedly.

Which gets tiresome after a while. I was about 3/4 of the way through when I got tired of it, and entered these two lines into the console:

bind f10 god

bind f11 give all

and then things were less annoying. Sarge, for example.

I did like the part where the fact that weapons, ammo, etc are just lying around everywhere--at least that makes sense in the game story. It would also probably help quite a bit if you had a real 5.1 sound system, with speakers placed in front and behind you, so you'd know when a creature spawned behind you (which happens pretty often), and which one it was--they seemed to have unique audio which you could recognize them with (for example, the guy with the shoulder-mounted rockets always seemed to be saying "big banana").

[update on July 30: forgot this earlier: here's the URL to a really nifty screen-snap of what happens when you shotgun one of the zombies up close and personal.

note right above the red circle in the middle there's a round thing with some lines both horiz and vert: that's a zombie brain popping out of the skull after you shoot it in the head with the shotgun at close range. That was classic! Hilarious!]

Questions: with all this mil gear around, how come I don't have night-vision goggles? and how come I can't hold the flashlight and the pistol at the same time?

I only paid $20 for it, got my money's worth, although I won't play it a second time...there are other games I like better, even after multiple plays on an invariant linear game. Like UT04, which I found 30+ maps for last month.


Update on July 29. I watched the DOOM movie again last night (saw it first 2-3 months ago, long before playing the game)...There's really not much connection between the two, which is kinda disappointing. I think if the movie had tightly followed the game, it would have been better...as it was, it seemed like a lot of other secret-genetic-lab-experiments-on-humans-gone-awry movies (wasn't Resident Evil much the same?), as opposed to monsters-from-a-portal-to-hell (and there weren't nearly enough of them--I mean, I musta blasted 3-4 *hundred* in the game). And what was that stuff about evacuating civilians? The Marines strike team spends time in a "sewer" ?! on Mars !? Well, most of the lights were broken in the movie, too--and they did NOT have night-vision goggles. Nor did they find ammo-n-weapons lying around everywhere, etc. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the movie, but it pales next to the game.