You didn’t ask for it, but I know you’re curious. So here’s the complete list of video games I own that I’ve never played. This is not including re-releases that I haven’t played, but have played the original release (because there are lots of those too). Nor does it include games that I have played for at least one minute.
Prepare yourself, you are about to stare directly into the depths of my sickness.
Merry MegaMas, everyone!
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Super Smash Bros for Wii U (WiiU) – Words about Smash Brothers.
Hyrule Warriors (WiiU) – Forever. It’s going to last forever.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (WiiU) – Delightful. Though sometimes needlessly cruel.
Always Sometimes Monsters (PC) – Slow going on this one. I’ve played through two and a half days, and it seems like there isn’t always something to do? Maybe I need to talk to more people. Unless it gets more interesting, I might have to shelve this one. It’s a shame, because it seemed really neat at first.
Super Smash Bros for 3DS (3DS) – I told you last month, it’s considered beaten, but I’m not done with it yet. Had to hunt down all of those trophies! …and then just play more.
Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) – Decided to go back to this for a bit because it’s wonderful and worth beating. We’ll see if I can make it though, as it gets incredibly difficult. Working on World 7 at the moment.
Alien: Isolation (360) – More of this happened, but very little progress was made. Stuck partway through chapter ten, I think?
A Kappa’s Trail (DSi) – A game I got for free through Club Nintendo. It’s one of those rare games that’s played entirely with the touch screen, but is also really good.
Sacred Citadel (PC) – I was intent on just burning my way to the end of this one, but then the difficulty spiked on Act 4 and I don’t really wanna grind levels…
Lucadian Chronicles (WiiU) – A card battle game. Free, so I gave it a shot. Passed the first chapter, don’t know if I’ll ever go back.
Saints Row IV (PC) – Here we go, down the rabbit hole again…
Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (3DS) – Nuzlocke victory!!
Mega Man Legends (PS1) – One of my favourite Playstation games. Some of the best 3D visuals on the machine, if nothing else (there is plenty of else).
Evoland (PC) – It’s a cute little indie game wherein you actually collect the game mechanics, graphics, etc as you go. Eventually it loses is way and ends up being about twice as long as it needs to be. Still, at 3-4 hours long, it’s not a dealbreaker.
Dragon Quest (iOS) – It’s Dragon Quest. There’s not a lot to say about it.
The Letter (WiiU) – Not the worst dollar I’ve spent, but I’m a little disappointed that Nintendo is apparently letting just anything onto the eShop. Whatever happened to quality control?
Dead Bits (PC) – It’s kind of crappy. But I only paid sixteen cents for it, so I can’t really complain.
Mega Man 4 (NES) – Still my favourite Mega Man.
Mega Man IV (GB) – A wonderful game through and through, with the single glaring exception of Crystal Man’s stage. It is, in a word, poop.
Mega Man II (GB) – Yup, still embarrassingly easy. Terrible soundtrack.
Mega Man 5 (NES) – Almost as easy. The Protoman and Wily Castles have some challenging levels, and Charge Man is the only boss that isn’t a complete pushover.
Mega Man 3 (NES) – Great until Doc Robot shows up. Then it becomes almost unbearably hard.
Mega Man III (GB) – The exact opposite of MMII GB. So, very difficult and perfect music (or at least as close to perfect as the Game Boy is going to get).
Super Mario Advance (GBA) – Intended to play through every stage, but I accidentally warped past World 6. Didn’t even know that there was a warp in 5-3, because I always use the 4-2 warp.
Another month down, another month saturated with Smash Bros. Two flavours of Smash Bros this time, even! And also some other things. Mostly Zelda. Why do I even own any non-Nintendo machines?
Super Smash Bros for Wii U (WiiU) – Thank you, Nintendo.
Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (3DS) – Having completed the Generation VII Pokédex in Pokémon Y, I decided to eschew my normal Pokémon tendencies and do a nuzlocke run. It was going really well until my Voltorb died and now I don’t know if I have the will to go on. Poor Vince, he was so young…
Hyrule Warriors (WiiU) – I’d be done this if it weren’t for the massive DLC packs that keep coming out. They add weeks and weeks to the game’s already-pretty-long lifespan. And I haven’t even finished the original Adventure Mode yet!
Wii Fit U (WiiU) – I really shouldn’t bother writing this in, but I’ve been using it a lot lately! Enough that I’ve even gotten passably good at that waiter game that I used to hate with a firey passion. Still, every time I turn it on, I get a sad from remembering that I lost my Fit Meter long ago.
Always Sometimes Monsters (PC) – I don’t even know where to start with this one. It’s a 2D RPG in a modern setting, where you’ve got to wrangle up a bunch of money to pay your rent. There’s more than that, but I feel like going into it would ruin it. It’s a bit slow, but it seems like a good way to spend a few Saturday mornings.
Alien: Isolation (360) – It’s too scary to type anything about it!
Super Mario Advance (GBA) – This was the only GBA game I owned for quite a while, so I played the ever-loving crap out of it. That also gave me great deal of nostalgia for it. I’d love for it to be HD-ified, because it’s my favourite version of Mario 2, but the colours look so faded and it doesn’t fit quite right in GBA resolution.
Super Smash Bros for 3DS (3DS) – I’m not ceasing to play it, but I’ve cleared all the challenges, so I’m calling it beaten.
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii) – Probably should have lumped this one and Majora under “Re-runs” because I burned through them both fairly quickly, but I think the “Game Over” category has a little more clout. Or something. I really like Twilight Princess. This is the fifth time I’ve beaten it. To 100% (less the Poes because F the Poes).
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (N64) – I always start writing this feature near the beginning of the month, and initially I’d written a blurb about how I’d like a 3DS remake of this game to happen. Guess what was announced literally that afternoon. Still played the N64 version because I had just dropped $10 on the Virtual Console version. You’re welcome.
Picross e5 (3DS) – Yup it’s another Picross game. And I played it.
Spirits (PC) – Kind of like Lemmings, but less cartoony and more artsy. Also your spirits can’t do nearly as many things as lemmings, and any action effectively kills them. I played through all the levels, but I just don’t care about it enough to bother with perfect clears. I wish that would stop being a thing.
Mighty Gunvolt (3DS) – A cute little 8-bit freebie they gave away with Azure Striker Gunvolt (which I still haven’t played). Four stages and a final boss of very base-level Mega Man-style action. Not totally fulfilling, but a good way to kill twenty minutes.
The Love Letter (PC) – An adorable browser game that I wrote about a week ago.
Mega Man X2 (SNES) – I usually play through Mega Man X once or twice a year, but I only go through X2 every few years and almost never touch X3. It’s really too bad, because X2 is pretty good. I just don’t know the optimal way through the game, so it seems like I end up revisiting stages to collect power-ups more than I should have to.
It’s a little-known fact that The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is my third-favourite Zelda game. Shocking, right? It’s a little divisive, but that’s only because of fools who can’t deal with the time limit. People who dive in headfirst and take the time to truly experience the game generally come out with a great appreciation for it and the living, breathing world that resides inside of it.
Majora’s Mask had it rough from the start; it was released on the same day as the Playstation 2. Whoops. Mega Man Legends 2 suffered from a very similar overshadowing, being released only two days prior. What a “fun” coincidence that two of the best sequels of that generation met with the same terrible fate.
Majora’s Mask wasn’t just a sequel though. It shared so much DNA with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time that you might think it was the same game. However, Majora took things in a wild and disturbing new direction. Ocarina was a revolution for the series as far as visuals and gameplay went, bringing Zelda into 3D and all that. But it still stuck fairly close to the Zelda formula: go through eight(ish) dungeons and then fight Ganon. Get a Triforce, save the princess.
The thing that many whiny pimple-faced teenagers complained about the loudest is that Majora only has four proper dungeons. Only half of what was expected of it. Regular villain Ganon/dorf was nowhere to be seen, I don’t think he gets as much as a name drop. Even the titular princess Zelda only shows up in a brief flashback. The treasure in each dungeon is a different type of arrow. Things were amiss, and at the time, fans were not happy about it.
But there’s so much more to this game than popping in all the familiar elements, giving them a new coat of paint, and calling it a day. In fact, Majora’s Mask is the exact opposite. It re-uses Ocarina’s assets without shame, and keeps the vast majority of Ocarina’s tool set. The basic gameplay mechanics are the exact same. It’s all very familiar, but the way that all these thing are put together is like nothing before and nothing afterward.
As the story goes, out hero Link stumbles into the bizarre world of Termina, a place that seems familiar at first glace, but if distressingly alien upon closer inspection. Speaking of distress, there’s a gigantic, grinning moon in the sky, and it’s falling. In only three days, that moon will collide with the Earth, eradicating Termina and all of its inhabitants. It’s a tension-filled race against time.
Well, maybe not that tense. You see, you have the power to turn back time whenever you like, and start the three-day cycle anew. This throws a lot of people off. “How am I supposed to win in three days?” they ask, stupidly. You’re not. You’re supposed to accomplish a few little things on each cycle. You’re not expected to be doing something important for entire duration of all three of those days.
This repeating three-day cycle is the other huge point of contention among the haters. “But everything I did is undone when I reset time!” they complained, ignorantly. That’s kind of the whole point.
The overarching theme of Majora’s Mask is despair. It’s oppressive, violent, and bleak. As you play those three dire days over and over again, you’ll get to know the people of the land. You’ll see their excitement for the coming carnival slowly give way to despair for their coming doom. There are very few gaming experiences that are so chilling as running around Clock Town with only a few hours left to impact.
Take the postman for example. He jovially runs around town, picking up and delivering the mail every day. He is shackled to his rigid schedule, but he loves his work. He’s perfectly happy with his daily routine. Until the evening of the third day. If you enter the post office at that point, the postman will be writhing on the floor, unable to run for his life because of his duty to adhere to the schedule. On his bed is an opened letter, written to the postman by himself, urging him to flee even though it’s not on the schedule. But he can’t do it, can’t save his own life. His life is his work. What would he have left if he abandoned his post? It’s dark, it’s haunting, it’s beautiful.
Of course, you can help the postman. There is a way to convince him to run to safety. But then you start the cycle over, and it’s like you never did a thing. The new instance of the poor postman will probably spend his final hours in mental agony, wishing that he could run, but unable to. Because you won’t save him again. Why would you? You already have the Postman’s Hat for doing it once. Every future postman (until you complete the game) will die a horrible death.
That’s just how it is. Many of the people of Termina have problems. Some more dire or elaborate than others, and you’re literally only helping them for the prize. You’ll gain no satisfaction from giving them a hand, because when you turn back time, it’ll be like you never did anything at all. And you’re going to feel bad about it too, because these characters are very well-realized. while the NPCs in Ocarina were just sort of there, these are people with lives and schedules and personalities. You’ll get to know them well, watching them live out their last three days over and over again.
Yeah, it sounds really bleak and depressing. And it is! But think back, and try to imagine any other Zelda game that’s actually evoked an emotional response from you (aside from The Wind Waker). There probably aren’t any. Majora’s Mask is unique in that it’s a game world that makes you want to save it. You’ll feel beaten down and hopeless most of the time, but that just makes it that much more rewarding whenever you make those little bits of permanent progress.
When it first came out, I did feign disinterest in Majora’s Mask while in public, because that was the popular opinion amongst my peers, and high school is the very last place you want to stand out from the crowd. But secretly, I adored it. I was charmed by its offbeat world, I appreciated the three-day cycle, and I loved the grim atmosphere that permeated the entire game. There was a point in time where I would go home after school every day and play it until I fell asleep. Must have beaten it four or five times in a row. Even if it’s not the best video game, it’s absolutely a work of art. I can’t wait to experience the polished-up version on 3DS.
I was reading some of X-Entertainment’s old movie reviews the other day, which were, if you weren’t already aware, the inspiration for this blog. You really can’t find writing like that any more. Even DinoDrac doesn’t have that same tone. But that’s what time does. The internet is a much different place than in was in 2002. Thoughtfully-written websites and blogs are gone in favour of mindless Tweets and Facebook statuses. Luckily, things tend to stick around forever on here.
Reading those old reviews sparked my will to write, and my initial inspiration was to write a big long blog post about why I don’t watch movies any more. But that very quickly became a huge mess of partial thoughts and poorly-described neuroses. So I burned it down and tried to create a shorter, point-form version of it. That ended up in pretty much the same boat, so I axed it as well.
Then I had a flash of brilliance: Why not actually just watch a movie and then review it?
The problem was where to start. The frightening truth is that I haven’t watched about a quarter of the movies I own. There was a lot to choose from. But it had to be something reviewable. And by that, I mean corny and easy to make fun of. I figured that I’d already set a precedent, so I might as well try something else from the Roger Corman box set.
And that’s why you’re going to read about Attack of the Giant Leeches today.
Continue reading Attack of the Garbage Bag Men! I mean Giant Leeches!
I really didn’t think that I’d play many games in October, what with the Smash Bros and all, but I did! Less than usual, perhaps, but I’ve still got a respectable list here.
I didn’t do a very good job of playing anything terribly Halloweeny. I didn’t even buy Alien: Isolation or The Evil Within. A few of the games on this list are of a spooky-ish nature, but nothing overtly horror-themed. And Monster Manor doesn’t count, because I play a little bit of it every month.
Super Smash Bros (3DS) – Yeah, this version of Smash doesn’t play on a TV, but it’s so good. It’ll probably be the death of my 3DS. It’s great to have Smash on the go anyway.
Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen (PS3) – Dark Arisen is an expansion pack for the original DragDog. It was not released as $15 DLC, but rather a reissue of the whole game plus the new content for $40. I wanted it badly (DragDog is one of my favourite games), but not at that price. When it went on sale for $7 in September, I nearly exploded with excitement. However, I only played up until the point where I was able to leave Cassardis.
Hyrule Warriors (Wii U) – I may have plugged almost as many hours into this as I have Smash so far. Currently I’m trying to clear off as much of the Adventure Map as I can. I’d say I’m three-fifths done. Maybe?
I suppose I probably should clarify a stance or something, but I’ve been trying to avoid any GamerGate-related talk on here because the only thing that’s good for is bringing people down, and I want my blog to be a more positive place. If I’m going to type anything depressing, it’ll be personal woes, not about people being horrible to other people.
For the record, I don’t think that social politics should be part of video games, so I don’t want to get involved. But I do believe that video games should be enjoyable for everyone. Men, women, everyone in-between. They’re not for an exclusive club of socially-challenged nerds. All my life I’ve been waiting for the stigma against gamers to go away, waiting for the day when I could play my 3DS on the bus and not have to feel like I’m being judged. GamerGate is just making it worse. It has nothing to do with journalistic integrity and everything to do with hatemongering. So yeah, I want GamerGate and all their stupid crap to go away.
But that’s just sort of a preamble for what I really want to write about today, because I honestly can’t say much about it: The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo. It’s a text adventure, which might immediately disinterest a few, but keep in mind that it’s short and you can probably reach the final ending within about 20 minutes.
The game starts out all cute and nostalgic, but quickly gets creepy and uncomfortable. It’s probably the most enjoyable Twine game I’ve played, which isn’t playing much, since I’ve only played like three. There are a handful of endings to earn, and the game does a very nice job of hinting towards ones you haven’t yet found. It also provides a very nice option to restart at the point in the game where your decisions start to matter, cutting out all the setup on replays.
I’d like to say more about it, but I don’t really want to spoil anything. The one thing I do want to mention is that if you make certain choices, the game does go down a very GamerGate-relevant path. Yeah, it gets a wee bit preachy, but it doesn’t detract from the overall experience.
I absolutely recommend checking out UWWFN long enough to find your way to the real ending. A good way to kill half an hour, if nothing else. And it’s a browser game, so you’ve got no good excuse not to. Just make sure you do it on a real computer and not your phone or tablet, because the audio component is pretty important.
Oh, and if you’re a big fraidy-cat like me, maybe play in the afternoon. It gets pretty spooky.
I played The Last Of Us last month. I noted in the Monthend Wrap-Up that I wasn’t overly fond of it. That’s really only half the story though. Or maybe about a third of it. Because there’s a lot to like about the game! It’s just that the parts I didn’t like were so aggravating that it soured my opinion of the entire experience, which is completely opposite of how I usually roll.
Normally I’m able to overlook rough patches in games or movies or what-have-you and come out enjoying the product on the whole. I think it’s a good philosophy, as it lets me enjoy more things, and I spent less time sounding like a douchey nerd, complaining about stupid little things in an otherwise likeable product.
Like I said before, there are plenty of things about The Last Of Us that I liked. The story, for instance. At first glance, it’s just another stupid zombie game. But then you notice that the more dangerous zombies have mushrooms growing out of their heads. That’s… unusual? Because they are not affected by some silly man-made chemical or evil space-dust. These zombies are people who have been parasitized by cordyceps fungus. Which is a real Goddamn thing. Only in real life it doesn’t affect humans. Just bugs and possibly plants. I don’t know, I didn’t research it enough. But it’s spooky because it’s real and not totally outside the spectrum of plausibility. This is possibly the finest excuse for zombies that anyone has ever come up with.
The characters are also quite likeable. Joel, maybe not so much. He’s a gruff badass who eventually learns to open his heart, which is the stockingest character there is. Ellie, on the other hand, is his 14-year-old companion, and she is effing great. Yes, she’s an obnoxious teenager, but she’s a lovable kind of obnoxious teenager. Not the most original character either, but she’s written very well, and it’s a shame any time the two get split up. The only reason that I didn’t write off Joel completely is because they play off each other perfectly. A lot of the secondary characters are great too, even though they only stick around for a couple hours each.
The Last Of Us features some very nice stealth-based gameplay. Many encounters can be won by sneaking around all quiet-like and dispatching your enemies (with a good old fashioned choke) one by one. Sometimes you can even sneak your way through an area without killing anyone. And there are plenty of options for when you do want to kill people. You can throw trash around to distract them, or bonk them on the head with a bottle to stun them while you rush up to finish them off. Maybe you just want to lay down a home-made bomb as a trap, or toss a smoke bomb to cover your escape. It’s all quite wonderful, and if the entire game was just these stealth sections, I’d be over the moon.
But it’s not. Every once in a while, the game forces you into a shootout. If you mess up at being sneaky, you’re going to have to reset or finish the encounter with bullets. Sometimes you’ll just be automatically thrust into a firefight with bandits, or the zombies will just inexplicably know that you’re there and rush you all at once. Even worse, is when you meticulously clear out an area with stealth kills, and then trip an invisible event trigger that spawns a dozen enemies in that exact same area that you then have to fight with guns and fists. Those ones are the absolute worst, and they very nearly ruined the entire game for me.
In the early game at least, you have two options when you’re forced to fight zombies. You can try to melee them. This is a waste of time, because while you’re wailing away on one zombie (who will take 4-5 punches to kill), his six or seven friends are tearing you a new one. There are melee weapons laying about here and there, but they’re only a little more effective than your fists, and even then they’re only good for a handful of attacks before they break. Eventually you’ll have home-made bombs, too, but they’re much more useful to lay as traps while you’re in a stealth combat sequence.
Guns are a bit of a wash, too. Not only is it incredibly hard to aim (you can upgrade your aim wiggle, but it costs a small fortune in upgrade pills), but the zombies are brilliant at dodging about as they race towards you. They can’t tell the difference between your flashlight and natural light, but they’re incredibly adept at juking around to dodge your bullets. Yeah, sure. That’s a bit of a stretch there, guys. You don’t get very many bullets either, but that’s a feature that I can live with, and even sort of appreciate, having spent so much of my teen years with Resident Evil games.
There’s apparently a DLC pack for the game that includes the “Grounded” difficulty, which not only makes enemies stronger, but removes the HUD and your ability to sense nearby enemies, and slims the amount of scavengable resources down to the bare minimum. I won’t pay for this mode, but I have to assume that it’s literally impossible. A lack of bullets will be worse than ever since trying to shoot anything in this game is already a major pain, and melee combat is almost completely useless on the normal difficulty. I can imagine that you’ll play up until the first time you come upon a forced zombie fight, and then the game is over because there’s no way to win. It’s a terrible joke from the developers, and you have to pay them to suffer it.
So I guess that what I’m getting at is that I’d like for The Last Of Us to be more like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. In fact, it’s already an awful lot like Shattered Memories, but I’d love it to pieces if it traded in all the shooty sections for running away and stealth times. It would flip my opinion of the game right around, and I’d start to understand why it’s been almost universally praised. As it is though, it’s just another humdrum third-person shooter with a really great story and occasionally a really fun gameplay sequence.
Hey so summertime is drawing to a close, not that that means anything for adults. I guess if you’re a teacher, it’s good times, but for the rest of us it just means that you’re covered in sweat after your commutes to and from work. Hooray.
I had another vacation week in August, so I put it to good use and cleared off a few half-finished games from my backlog. But then I started up a whole new series of games, so it’s all been moot. It’s not like I had anything else worth doing. I got my yard work done too, at least.
Saints Row: The Third (PC) – I don’t know what to say about this yet. I’ve only completed the intro missions, and I’ve mostly been driving around the city at random, collecting stuff and doing assassination missions. I’ve done a few story missions, and unlocked a sweet penthouse base. Also an unlimited supply of fighter planes!? This is absolutely the most fun I’ve had with an open-world game of this style. But somehow it’s missing fast travel. Lame. I hate having to hoof it all the way back to base when my aircraft inevitably explodes.
My frame of reference for the DOOM series (I’m just going to capitalize the D from now on) exists in a time somewhere between 1994 and 2000. Doom II was one of the few full-version computer games we had back then that I was keenly interested in, and I played it was the only one. Of course, at some point, my taste for Doom and similar games (Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem 3D, etc) waned and I moved on to newer, fancier computer games.
Doom 64 doesn’t have the greatest reputation. It’s not particularly hated or anything, but the internet’s collective opinion is that the original games are better. In the interest of finding out for sure, I made sure to play through the entirety of the Xbox port of Doom so that I could have more than faded memories to make a comparison to.
The original Doom is fantastic. It’s a simplistic game that doesn’t even let you look along the vertical axis, but it felt much more satisfying to play than most modern first-person shooters. The first two chapters are breezy fun, the third dials it up to push your abilities, and the fourth (an add-on scenario) is simply there to beat you into the ground. What’s most remarkable is that Doom feels really great to play with a controller, as opposed to the keyboard controls (sans-mouse) that I was shackled to in my youth.
Having completed the entirety of Doom for the very first time, and having enjoyed roughly 95% of it (there are some really cheap traps later on), I was riding high and expecting Doom 64 to be a similar experience.
But then it turns out that Doom 64 is poop from a butt.
My very first mistake was playing on a difficulty level that was too much for me. I had chosen “Hurt Me Plenty” on Doom, which is the default setting and equates to what the “Normal” setting would be in other games. Doom 64 phrases it differently, where the equivalent is “I Own Doom.” Sure, it’s the default difficulty, and also a statement of fact. Why would I choose any other setting?
Assuming that it is, in fact, the average difficulty setting, Doom 64 is a brutal game. I was killed twice before I was able to finish the first stage. Secret doors containing monsters open silently behind you. The Average Joe Zombie has a very accurate shot. Rooms are filled with up to eight monsters.
None of this is helped by that fact that playing similar games on an Xbox 360 controller and then an N64 controller is like going from a fork to chopsticks. I figured that all my N64 playing over the last few months would have eased me into the controller, but it turned out to be a massive source of woes for me. I blame it entirely no having used the vastly superior 360 controller immediately beforehand, and it really shows how difficult it can be to adapt to different controllers.
I need to make it very clear though, that Doom 64 lets you customize your controls any damn way you like. Every function is remappable, and you can make changes to your control scheme at any point. It’s a really handy feature, as the default control setup is kinda weird. The only downside is that custom setups aren’t saved, and you have to remap all your buttons each time you power on.
The next big gripe about Doom 64 is the general atmosphere. the graphics, for one, are much darker and more bland than in the PC games. This is to accommodate a generally more horror-focused aesthetic. Doom has always been “scary” in that it incorporates monsters and gore, but the first two PC games were more about stright-up action than trying to frighten you. Doom 64 has this all backwards. The PC games have interesting, colourful visuals, while Doom 64 is awash in browns and grays.
I do appreciate that the team tried to make the graphics more detailed (which they are!), but they killed a lot of the character in the sprites by removing most of their colours.
The sound design has also gone entirely to pot. Doom’s characteristic heavy metal MIDIs have been replaced with subdues, spooky ambiance tracks. This is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. More importantly though, the monsters barely make any sounds unless they’re attacking you. Being able to hear monsters lurking about was a very important part of Doom; you would usually know when a monster was lurking about by the hisses and growls echoing through the halls. Now, pretty much every encounter is a surprise, and monsters will be able to sneak up behind you with no problem at all.
So after having painfully made my way through one and a half stages, I quit, took a week-long breather, and started up again on the next rung down the difficulty ladder, “Bring It On!”
Let me also take an aside here to mention that Doom 64 does not save your game. It uses passwords, which is kinda bonkers. The nice thing is that the passwords save your state (health, armor, guns/ammo) as well as which level you’re on, which is nice. If they only saved your level, it would be a massive pain in the hiney to tackle later levels with only a pistol. No saving is still a big pain though, as mid-stage saves saved me a lot of time when going through the original game. Having to restart a level from the beginning after each death is a little disheartening. I hate sounding like a spoiled brat, but that’s what I am.
Not everything about Doom 64 is bad, though. I really like a lot of the level designs, they feel a lot bigger and more ambitious than in the older games. I suppose that stands to reason though. It’s not like a lot of games get smaller and humbler with each sequel. It’s really just too bad that the designers didn’t seem to have many good ideas for traps. It seems like they decided early on that having enemies appear out of thin air behind you was going to be their bread and butter. Still, the actual architecture of the stages is usually impressive, and I enjoyed navigating and solving them.
Doom 64 features the usual Doom weaponry, including Doom II’s super (double-barreled) shotgun and the totally sweet double chainsaw. It also has a new weapon that’s unique to only this game: the Unmaker. It’s an alien-tech laser gun, which doesn’t seem all that impressive at first. However, if you take the trouble to find the secret stages, each one contains a collectible artifact that adds to the Unmaker’s power. The first one speeds up its fire rate, and the second and third give it double and triple beams respectively. Even if you only find the one artifact, the sped-up Unmaker is a pretty awesome gun, burning through even Barons of Hell like a hot knife through butter. It’s pretty great.
The monsters in Doom 64 may at fist appear to be new, but really, they’re mostly your old favourites with fancy makeovers. Some are pretty familiar, like the standard zombies and the pinkies, but you probably won’t recognize Doom 64’s imp as an imp until you’re already choking down fireballs. Cacodemons and pain elementals have likewise gotten new sprites that barely resemble their older incarnations. The one new monster is barely new at all. Nightmare imps are just translucent blue imps, with purple fireballs that fly quite a bit faster than the standard imp’s. Doom 64 does have a unique final boss, the Mother Demon. She’s ugly and can tear you apart in record time (that also works the other way around with a powered-up Unmaker), but she looks pretty dumb. Kinda like a big, fleshy bug, if you ask me.
In the end, Doom 64 is caught in a weird place. On one hand, I really like a lot of the levels. On the other hand, pretty much everything else is different in a bad way. It’s reminiscent of Doom, but it doesn’t really feel like Doom, if that makes any sense at all. There really isn’t any reason to play Doom 64. Regardless of whether you’re looking to play a Doom game or an N64 shooter, there are a handful of better choices out there. Even if you’re intent on playing through the entire Doom canon, you might be better off trying one of the fan-made PC ports. Poor Doom 64 just isn’t quite the game it should be.
