zajazd on 13/8/2012 at 20:31
It's not just a map pack, it's a masterpiece add-on that sat in office drawer for many years and then was found and released as free download. Blood doesn't have nice story like that. Shadow Warrior has another add-on Twin Dragon, but that one is a mediocre map pack tho.
june gloom on 13/8/2012 at 20:37
A masterpiece? My entire ass.
henke on 13/8/2012 at 20:49
I feel like I'm watching a Coke vs Pepsi argument unfolding.
june gloom on 13/8/2012 at 21:20
No, it's just zajazd being a troll again.
nicked on 14/8/2012 at 06:30
I doubt a Shadow Warrior remake would fly these days, for the same reason DNF got slated for being unnecessarily misogynistic. When your protagonist's name is Lo Wang, you're going to have a job fitting in in 2012 without at least a minor upset about political correctness. Blood, on the other hand, with it's fairly harmless comedy-horror, cheesy, Evil-Dead-like aesthetic would be the good kind of retro suited to a nostalgic remake.
Clockface on 22/8/2012 at 13:22
Quote Posted by Angel Dust
Indeed, Renz. On a whim, I started it up about a month ago and had a blast over the next few days playing it. With mouse-look the difficulty feels much more balanced and the level design it still some of the best ever for an FPS. Why can't someone make levels like that in a modern engine?
As Renzatic (and many others over the years) says, it's because of the dumbing down of games. Look at Perfect Dark, released in 2000 to more or less great acclaim, then re-released exactly the same, but with high-definition and online multiplayer, in 2010. And the re-release was greeted with lots of cries of "It's too confusing, I don;t know what to do", even though no one had said this when the same game (minus high-def. graphics and online) was released ten years earlier.
See, the game starts with the main character (you) covertly dropped onto the roof of a sky-scraper, the skyscraper that is believed to house the secret laboratories of your enemy in it's basement. And so you start the game on the roof of the skyscraper, with the instructions "Make your way to the basement". And in 2000, players could understand from that they had to, well, go down the building and find the entrance to the basement. But in 2010, players new to the game were complaining that there was no onscreen arrow, no in-game map, no HUD indication of where to go. In 2000, players looked around the roof top, saw the stairway door, went though it, and descending through the floors of the builing via the lift (elevator) and stairways until they got to the ground floor of the skyscraper and found the life/elevator that led to the basement.
But in 2010 people were so used to being led by the nose, that they felt compelled to post on the 'net that the game was confusing hard to understand. It's just a simple shooter, but players nowadays are so used to being told exactly what to do (even down to "Press A to Open" type prompts EVERY SINGLE TIME you come to a door), checkpoints every few minutes, massive simplification of already very simple in-game tasks, etc, that they no longer expect to have to explore a level in a first person shooter, and they don't draw a mental map of the level they are playing through as the expect an onscreen indication of where to go next.
I can't say how much I prefer older FPS games, such as Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, No One Lives Forever 1 and 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Unreal Tournament 1999/2004, etc. Granted none of them are exactly mentally taxing, but they are far better (IMHO) than most of the vapid, undemanding FPSs released in the past few years.
Having said that, I do love Bioshock 1 and 2 (and the B2 expansion pack Minerva's Den), and Singularity, but otherwise I'd pretty much say the past five years has been a very bad time for first person shooters.
