Gladius and Doom have been the games most played this weekend. I also discovered an interesting game from about 15 years ago that I'll share with you further down.
Gladius
My significant other and I started a co-op game of Gladius, and our team-up has been surprisingly effective. I'd completed all of one campaign, Valens', and wanted to start Ursula's. My SO has already completed several campaigns but still wants to try out new combinations of stuff, so we sort of agreed on which classes we want to hire and spread them pretty evenly. So far the satyr and the berserker get the most attention from me, and we have a couple bandits who give each other movement and initiative bonuses, which is nice.
I also benefit from my SO's thorough understanding of the game, so I can skip the boring tutorial bits quickly and get to building a good gladiatorial team. Given that I can still find surprises neither of us have seen before, I feel that I hold my own :)
Doom. The First One.
I pulled out Doom 3 recently, which has a special feature letting me play the original Doom and Doom II on my TV. It plays really well, and the PC versions that I bought from Id so long ago are pretty much lost to history for me so it's my main method of playing these old games now, and they still play pretty well. I'm still surprised by how much I remember, especially from the shareware levels. The second two episodes are a bit harder for me to remember every little detail for, and although I try to get 100% secrets without looking anything up, I've had to pass on some levels.
Maybe some day I'll take myself up on the challenge to play through on Nightmare, or start each level with just a pistol and 50 bullets, but I have to balance challenge with having a good time.
What I find I miss most is a melee button. I never realized how sensible it was to have a melee mode for every weapon until I went back to Doom and found switching to a chainsaw or fist every time I got in too close to a baddy. I would also like a flashlight on my visor, another Halo reference I guess, but even Doom 3 made you hold the flashlight separately from wielding a weapon, so that's probably a bit too much to expect, especially when dynamic lighting was in its infancy when the original Doom was made. Strangely enough, I'm used to the lack of mouselook so that isn't a big deal, although turning with the right thumbstick is a bit too slow for my tastes.
This particular version lacks independent map scrolling, and it's not really optimized for a high density TV so things look a bit gravely when you're moving around. There's also a bug that I don't remember being in early editions, but it seems to be in a lot of later ones: when you save and then reload, if the monsters aren't looking at you, they revert to holding mode and don't attack. They're activated by weapons fire, but that still means it can be easily exploited. I tend to only save when I'm in a safe spot, anyway, but it's still a bit annoying. Not as annoying as another one I encountered on an older platform that ignored the whole enemy-on-enemy fighting mechanic. To me it isn't Doom if enemies don't fight each other.
The game still feels a bit cheap when doing something opens a nest full of enemies behind you; any pretense of a story in Doom is gone for me now that narrative gaming has taken many leaps forward since then, but somehow the limits on possibilities in Doom make me feel less cheated than in Doom 3. I'm OK with these scripted events in Doom because I feel like I bring them on myself almost, and no matter how messed up a particular scenario is, I never feel like the game is pounding me for no reason.
Inner Worlds
I had never heard of or seen Inner Worlds until a few days ago. It's a platformer in the late 80's, early 90's mode, with some cool music, animation, early arcade-style parallax scrolling, and has one of the least intrusive tutorial levels I've ever seen. It's now freeware, released by developer Sleepless Software, although they also allow you to purchase it from them if you enjoy it. Here's a video; gameplay starts one minute in:
http://quietube.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpYmurE8LWo
I've managed to snag a copy but haven't played it yet so I can't say anything about the controls, but it's nice to see a game like this, even though admitting that dates my sensibilities a bit. I'm betting DOSBox will be the key to unlocking it, though I haven't tried just yet.
Anyone find any interesting hidden gems or gaming underdogs they want to share?
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