you thought halo ce aged poorly?

...then how the hell was bungie utterly outshining that game's level design a whopping 7+ years before it was even conceived?! for a game of so many firsts in first person shooters, it's unnerving how little recognition marathon gets. not to mention how many of its pioneered ideas are often wrongfully attributed to the likes of half life; health stations, friendly npcs and narrative drive, to name a few

more than anything being falsely credited however, i'm upset that this melee combat hasn't been actively replicated by literally every succeeding fps. typically when playing a shooter - especially on harder difficulties - most people start pissing their pants as soon as they fire their last clip. doom with fists only? duke with his shoe? sure, it's been done for challenge's sake, but is it ever optimal?

it is in marathon because your fists don't deal static damage - rather their power increases with speed. on total carnage, the most standard enemy can eat 6 whole pistol rounds before he croaks; that's trivialized to 3 quick meetings between fist and face if you know what you're doing. simply put, punching dudes till they explode is insanely addictive. tell me this isn't the sickest shit and i'll rightfully call you a liar

a few of the levels here would make halo's library check the fuck out (colony ship for sale and pfhoraphobia most notably) but despite the sadism, i'd call most everything here pretty well designed and memorable thanks to some solid puzzles and smartly-placed save points. weapons are fairly basic, but the alternate firing modes (another bungie-birthed fps mechanic - go figure) help vary things up a good bit. shoutouts to the fusion pistol, flamethrower and whatever the fuck that alien gun is in particular - especially the alien gun because i adore it

narratively, there's definitely stuff of interest being brewed and i'm more invested here than i ever was in the original halo's plot, but i can tell things are just getting started. so onward i go - to durandal...

the epitome of every common id tech 4 complaint; a show-offy tech demo with not much to actually show

prey seems to be far more concerned with its novel-at-first gravity shifting, portal hopping and other gimmickry than it is with delivering a fun shooter. almost every weapon feels pretty weak, enemies are as generic as they come and the level design is frustratingly boring - especially when it teases its potential so irritatingly often

there's some really cool aesthetic direction here - sometimes. the sphere's strange fusions of human civilization and mechanical-organic hodgepodge future tech that's reminiscent of quake's strogg is REALLY FUCKING COOL. but it's actively sidelined and little more than something to glance at in passing during the actual levels - steel halls with constant gravity walks, enemies popping out of portals and the occasional vehicle sequence. it's lame!

tommy's kind of an annoying jackass for most of the story. he embodies "Fuck off I don't believe in that made up nonsense" and constantly whines about how his heritage is a bunch of superstitious gobbledygook... even while he's literally talking to his deceased grandfather in the afterlife. though i guess i can't really blame him for not giving a shit, because his supernatural ability amounts to little more than being able to walk through forcefields and push the buttons behind them (usually to turn said forcefields off)

oh and to never die - tommy's really good at keeping his soul alive via 10 second bursts of spiritual whack-a-mole. i guess that works out because it means none of the dull shooting ever needs to be gone through a second time, but i'd have gladly taken some guns that actually felt satisfying instead. out of his arsenal, which is primarily driven by different flavors of machine guns, the only weapon i found especially great was the leech gun. i guess the weird caustic paint-splattering shotgun is kinda neat too. the grenades look cool but are functionally reminiscent of quake 2's, which is not a compliment at all and i barely touched them because of it

narratively, things pick up substantially in the last four missions. considering there's 21 of them, that's not a fantastic ratio, but it ended on an interesting enough note for me to wish prey 2 wasn't cancelled. so that counts for something

still, i find it hard to believe that a sequel to this would've been nearly as good as arkane's 2017 release

for being such a black sheep, you'd think it'd feel a hell of a lot less like doom!

sure, it's a more 64 oriented take than what most fans are comfortable with, but absolutely deserving of the moniker nonetheless; way more so than that qte-laden quake knockoff 2016 reboot, anyway

it's one thing not to like doom 3's pacing, corridor-driven structure and how it distributes enemies; it's another thing entirely to dismiss anything and everything designed outside shooter norms as "dated" - as if the lighting in this game isn't still impressive or completely and totally deliberate. that "duct tape" mod wasn't an ingenious feat of fan programming that fixed a broken aspect of a woefully mismanaged fps; it just went against the game's intended design

and call it a symptom of half life's popularity if you want; i feel the mars base introductory sequence is more atmospherically dense and to-the-point than black mesa could've dreamed to be. unlike quake 4, which has a lot narrative stop-and-go, the action in doom 3 is almost completely uninterrupted throughout. it's story-driven compared to its maze-y predecessors, but most of that happens via in-game radio chatter. never once did i ask myself "where's the next thing to shoot at?"

hell - if anything i'd say this may be the core doom experience to a fault. the way enemies are dispatched doesn't differ much from their DOS-based counterparts. there's a lot of strafing around projectiles and shotgun kissing. like - a lot. and that's great, but i'd be lying if i said i didn't get seriously tired of needing to back away from every door i opened to prevent getting jumped by an imp's otherwise unavoidable lunge attack. granted, this wasn't because it was cheap and unpredictable or whatever - much the opposite - all it took was running up to the guy when he stood up and blowing his ass away with a single shotgun blast

oh and since i've opened a can of controversy by even mentioning the shotgun, i'll just come out and say that it - along with pretty much every other weapon - is really good. yeah yeah, spread is bad, whatever. the maps are set up in small to medium sized corridors and arenas. so it's not hard to get up close and kill most enemies in a single shot. too far away? that's what your other weapons are for. i'm not sure where the strangely common ammo complaints come from either. i played on veteran and used most guns in equal measure (though i favored the shotgun and used the chainsaw religiously) and i often had max ammo for everything minus the bfg

my biggest problems with the game structurally, besides its oft stale monster closeting, are more retrospective than anything. the whole experience is lots of fun, but it ramps up so much more in the second half that i can't help but wonder why it doesn't get there sooner. why is so little time spent in hell and the nether regions of mars? why does the enemy variety take several hours to spontaneously expand beyond primarily shooting imps and marines?

i don't wanna mince words here: this is the best depiction of hell in the whole damn franchise. it's so grandiose, grim and genuinely fucking evil. the level design also feels much more in line with what i'd expect from a classic doom title and has brilliant lighting which forgoes any need to even use the flashlight. it's perfect but most of y'all probably didn't even see it because you dropped the game about six hours too soon

apparently resurrection of evil is a lot more akin to the second half so i'm expecting that to be great as well. whether i'll play that or prey 06 next, i'm not sure; what i am sure of is that id tech 4 goes hard and doom 3 is pretty fuckin' awesome. i'm not surprised to see that the common consensus of a post-quake id software game is wrong once again. at this point i probably wouldn't be surprised if rage was the best game ever