Caltrops - Gamerasutra - You won't know if the new Doom is any good until you play it for yourself.

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by (So you can stop reading now.) 06/26/2015, 5:35pm PDT

Polygon's Ben Kuchera wrote:

Hines went on to describe how to make the game "feel" like Doom. "I don't know, what's the chainsaw doing?" he asked. "Can you stick it in a demon and saw him in half? Can you grab them by the hand, rip them in two and see the spine sticking up? It turns out you can do that, and it makes it pretty cool and fun."

You probably had one of two reactions to that quote: Either you're pretty frickin' excited about seeing that shit, or you're a bit turned off by the level of violence they aimed for. Both reactions are perfectly fine, and the team behind Doom understands that they're going for a very specific audience that grew up with Doom and sees those challenging, violent aspects of the game as a selling point, not a flaw.

I had a third reaction to that quote, which was to wonder if Bethesda's Pete Hines had ever actually played Doom, because I don't remember any of that stuff being a part of it. In Doom, every time you did damage to a monster, there was a percentile chance (based on monster type) that it would enter a temporary pain state, rendering it unable to move or attack. The second most satisfying thing in the world to do with a demon was to position yourself someplace where only one could approach you at a time and stunlock the sonofabitch with your chainsaw, watching him flash his single solitary flinch frame over and over again as his ARGH-ARGH-ARGH-ARGH pain cry played on an endless loop, finally terminating in a burbling snort of eviscerated deflation. It doubtlessly looked janky as fuck to anyone watching over your shoulder or on a big screen in an auditorium, but every single link in that action chain was immediate, cancellable, interruptable, and never for a second out of your control. The visuals, despite being cutting edge for the time, were still entirely at the mercy of the gameplay. THIS IS WHAT MADE DOOM, FEEL LIKE DOOM. The specific graphical representation was secondary, but in an ideal world, here's what I would like to hear Pete Hines say about it:

"We sent a team to the Smithsonian to study the failed Silver Drawing Tests and spiderwebby swastika doodles on John Romero's production duotangs. That is where they are kept because we live in a society that values its games designers as much as the various chairs that Caroll O'Connor sat in."

This turned out to be more about Doom than Polygon. I'll add that their improbably and unpronuonceably named reviewer Russ Frushtick used terms like brutal and bone crushing to describe the difficulty in the Ducktales remake, ultimately awarding it a five out of ten for being in his opinion "miserably dull and frustrating", which I guess translates to a perfectly average day at Polygon.

Polygon is terrible by WITTGENSTEIN 06/26/2015, 8:51am PDT NEW

You won't know if the new Doom is any good until you play it for yourself. by (So you can stop reading now.) 06/26/2015, 5:35pm PDT NEW

Those are from the Brutal Doom mod. NT by MM 06/26/2015, 7:32pm PDT NEW