Matthew on 21/9/2011 at 13:35
Holy crap I just found an Exolon remake.
EvaUnit02 on 21/9/2011 at 13:54
(
http://zod.sourceforge.net/)
Quote:
Welcome to the Zod Engine project. The Zod Engine is an open source remake of the 1996 game Z by the Bitmap Brothers written in C++ using the SDL library for Linux / Windows / Etc.
Blue Sky on 21/9/2011 at 23:08
I hope this is true.
I am reminded of this absolutely awful book called "The Rough Guide to Videogames" by Kate Berens and Geoff Howard. It's meant to be a history of computer games including a list of "the 75 greatest games of all time".
"Of all time", you notice. Though in actuality, most of them are post-2005, with only ten games from the 1990's.
Now. Doom isn't featured in the canon. They don't consider Doom to be one of the 75 greatest games of all time.
That made me a bit angry, to be honest.
Their reasoning made me bloody livid. Here it is:
Quote Posted by "The Rough Guide to Video Games (page 16)"
What place, nostalgia?
Sometimes it pays to be harsh on history. Back in the 1990s, for example, gamers were raving about contemporary superhits as the greatest ever invented - and there were several that, at the time, fitted that label. Things move on, however: while it owes its very existence to Doom, there's no way Half-Life 2 would cede its place in the canon to the former in terms of gameplay and design. Such titles are interesting from an historical perspective, but only those looking for a nostalgia hit will really derive much value from them; others will most certainly get more out of later games.
The moral of this? Never trust someone who uses "an" in front of a word beginning with "h".
Jason Moyer on 21/9/2011 at 23:15
I'm proud to be the only person on the planet who apparently thought Doom was terrible when it was still relatively new.
demagogue on 21/9/2011 at 23:22
It's not about nostalgia. If their criteria for "greatness" doesn't recognize the cultural impact and the influence on the entire industry and the historical significance, then whatever other criteria they're using are stupid and relatively superficial. But seriously, if most of their games were post-2005 then it's easy to dismiss for the same reason "history" books about the last 5 years are suspicious, like where to rank Obama in terms of all presidents in history. They just can't have a long-term perspective on the game yet.
Of course if their book is just about the technical state of the art of gaming, and the games that represent the leading edge, which is what it sounds like they're really saying, that's a different thing and a legit thing to study. That's just what they should have said instead of a phrase like "greatest of all time".
Edit: For the record, I wasn't that into Doom when it came out either. Tomb Raider & Virtua Fighter had the bigger influence on me; but for that matter I was still into IF & RPGs more than anything around then. But I recognized that 3D games were the future of gaming and Doom was one of the progenitors.
Sulphur on 22/9/2011 at 06:48
If you give me a choice between Doom and Descent, I would choose Descent every time. I was already submerged in the Ultimas and Wing Commanders of the time to realise that Doom was a flashy but fundamentally shallow thing when I played the shareware episode.
Doom II, on the other hand - more of the same, but ridiculously fun and varied levels. Can't explain why I like it more than the original, it's probably a combination of nostalgia and sentimentality, because Doom II was the first game a friend copied over for me on a bunch of floppies and said, 'Here. Now let's talk about it when you play it.'
Yep. We were filthy teenage pirates.
june gloom on 22/9/2011 at 07:28
Doom II had some of the worst level design ever.
Sulphur on 22/9/2011 at 07:31
Did it? I can't remember, it's been ten, twelve years. All I remember is it was more fun than vanilla Doom.
Matthew on 22/9/2011 at 09:11
Shamefully, as an about-to-be-convert from the Amiga scene my first impression of Doom was that it was a fantasy rip-off of Terminator: Rampage.
