Hey, folks! The blog is a bit late this weekend. In case you didn't know, it's summer...and here in Texas, that means there's grills firing up everywhere and the smell of cooked animal flesh is filling the air. Barbeque is something of a tradition down here, but beyond that, it's a time of reconnecting with friends and family. That's something that's been lacking in the last few months, so changing up the pace a bit has been really nice. That doesn't mean that video games have been neglected, so read on!!!
U Can't Honestly Say From An Objective Sense That Doom Is Better Than...Lets Say Halo
That's a snippet of a message I received in my inbox from kishan6. This is not a callout to talk shit. On the contrary, I am glad that someone on this site is able to send a message that shows a level of intelligence (but you should work on your spelling a tad bit). He brought up a lot of great points.In case you haven't noticed, Doom II has landed on Xbox Live Arcade. There's been some recent shitstorms started about the Gamespot review for the game, as well as people asking "is the game still good?". This recent message that kishan6 sent me echoes a lot of the replies I've been seeing: shooters have advanced to the point that the functionality and fundamentalism of Doom II is not only obsolete, but that it makes it a bad game.
I can honestly say from an objective sense that I wouldn't try to compare Doom and Halo beyond the fact that both are first-person shooter games. The design philosophies behind each are drastically different.
Both are vastly different, so trying to compare the two is impossible on anything more than a rudimentary level of "hey, both of these feature a character holding a gun and shooting it in a first person camera perspective."
Just because a game was released some 15 years ago, that does not mean that it doesn't hold up on its own merits. Doom II is "the granddaddy of all shooters" for a reason, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game AT ALL.
Personally, I still think that Doom II is infinitely better than Half-Life or Halo, Call of Duty or even Quake. There is a visceral necessity to that game which none have been able to replicate since for me. Yes, I have a fanboy side when it comes to Doom. I have fond memories from when my Uncle Joe FINALLY built a computer powerful enough to run Doom II, and I would go over to play it. I mean, I'm so die-hard about Doom that I bought a 32X for my Genesis just to play the 32X version of the game!!! HOWEVER, I recently got Doom II on XBLA just to see how it holds up, especially on a console. I wasn't playing it for fanboyish necessity - I was playing it to see if it was still as good as it was 15 years ago. It is. It has aged well, and even the art assets for that game...despite their pixelation...are awesome. The sound effects, the soundtrack, the atmosphere, the lighting, everything in that game is STILL good.
It may not be Call of Duty or Halo or some of this other shit that's out nowadays, but none of those games try to be Doom...and Doom doesn't try to be those games. It is simply Doom II, and it proves still why it is the granddaddy of all shooters.
Until next time, folks...piece.
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