My PC budget hasn't been wasted.
by AC - permalink
Quick, think about three or four of your favorite games. Imagine playing them, think about why you love those games. If you're like me, you're thinking about the first few levels, if not just the first one. When I first fire up a game that's going to turn out to be great, it's those first maps/stages/levels that stick in my memory, because those are the maps that made me fall in love with the game. So when I get the urge to start one of my games over from the beginning, I always get sidetracked somewhere around the halfway point and start playing something else between sessions, and I never get back to my last savegame.
So I decided not to play any other FPS until I'm finished with my third play-through of Doom 3. And I think it's working. I started five days ago, and I'm only about two-thirds through now, because you do tend to get numb if you try to play this game any faster than that (it's not Half-Life 2, after all). And it's working, because I'm really loving this game, more than I did even when it was new. Since I started playing it, I've played only Club Pogo and old Genesis and 32X games, no FPS, and I'm eager to keep playing it. I just teleported into Hell after BFGing my first two Hellknights. I love those guys. They're just so badass, stomping around and smacking the holy hell out of you when you get too close.
I installed the Doom 3 1.3 patch this afternoon, but I might as well not have. There's virtually no noticable difference, and looking at the changelog, it seems that's because almost all the changes since 1.0 are on the multiplayer side or are related to the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil, which I haven't bought yet. I've noticed a total of one change in single player: the game now remembers what my previous weapon was when switching to the PDA and back while holding the flashlight. Whether that was worth a 30+MB download, I dunno.
Backtracking a bit, I abandoned Gens for Fusion, a Genesis emulator that also handles Master System, Game Gear, 32X, and Sega CD roms. I like Gens, but it had serious sound issues on my system. On the other hand, Fusion conforms to the original hardware's sprite limitations and doesn't dynamically scale to any window size. But it does let me play all my old 32X games, like Star Wars Arcade and Knuckles Chaotix. The 32X was an odd little system, and it probably should never have been released, but it gave me the first version of Doom I ever owned (before the excellent PlayStation port), and I'll always love it for that. Now, of course, I have Doom 3 and Doom Collector's Edition (The Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom), which I play via the Doomsday/jDoom source port. All I'm missing is Master Levels for Doom II. Now that I think about it, I should really have that.
Anyway, once I'm through with Doom 3, I'm torn between restarting Far Cry and Halo. I still haven't finished Halo, but it's because I just don't like it very much. It's actually one of only three games I own that I haven't finished, the other two being Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. San Andreas is one of my all time favorite games, but I haven't beaten it or Vice City because they were translated to the PC with missions that are completely unbeatable without a gamepad, and being a first-person shooter addict, I don't own one. Yet. I still have plans to pick one up, if not to beat those games, then to help with all my emulated 16-bit games, particularly my Genesis games designed for that legendary 6-button pad released specifically for the Genesis ports of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2.
Occasionally I think about digging up all my old consoles and games and hooking them up to my already convoluted TV/DVD/VCR/Satellite/Stereo setup, and I get a headache just thinking about it and go back to whatever I was doing. That's called preserving nostalgia, and is not at all laziness.
by AC - permalink
Quick, think about three or four of your favorite games. Imagine playing them, think about why you love those games. If you're like me, you're thinking about the first few levels, if not just the first one. When I first fire up a game that's going to turn out to be great, it's those first maps/stages/levels that stick in my memory, because those are the maps that made me fall in love with the game. So when I get the urge to start one of my games over from the beginning, I always get sidetracked somewhere around the halfway point and start playing something else between sessions, and I never get back to my last savegame.
So I decided not to play any other FPS until I'm finished with my third play-through of Doom 3. And I think it's working. I started five days ago, and I'm only about two-thirds through now, because you do tend to get numb if you try to play this game any faster than that (it's not Half-Life 2, after all). And it's working, because I'm really loving this game, more than I did even when it was new. Since I started playing it, I've played only Club Pogo and old Genesis and 32X games, no FPS, and I'm eager to keep playing it. I just teleported into Hell after BFGing my first two Hellknights. I love those guys. They're just so badass, stomping around and smacking the holy hell out of you when you get too close.
I installed the Doom 3 1.3 patch this afternoon, but I might as well not have. There's virtually no noticable difference, and looking at the changelog, it seems that's because almost all the changes since 1.0 are on the multiplayer side or are related to the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil, which I haven't bought yet. I've noticed a total of one change in single player: the game now remembers what my previous weapon was when switching to the PDA and back while holding the flashlight. Whether that was worth a 30+MB download, I dunno.
Backtracking a bit, I abandoned Gens for Fusion, a Genesis emulator that also handles Master System, Game Gear, 32X, and Sega CD roms. I like Gens, but it had serious sound issues on my system. On the other hand, Fusion conforms to the original hardware's sprite limitations and doesn't dynamically scale to any window size. But it does let me play all my old 32X games, like Star Wars Arcade and Knuckles Chaotix. The 32X was an odd little system, and it probably should never have been released, but it gave me the first version of Doom I ever owned (before the excellent PlayStation port), and I'll always love it for that. Now, of course, I have Doom 3 and Doom Collector's Edition (The Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom), which I play via the Doomsday/jDoom source port. All I'm missing is Master Levels for Doom II. Now that I think about it, I should really have that.
Anyway, once I'm through with Doom 3, I'm torn between restarting Far Cry and Halo. I still haven't finished Halo, but it's because I just don't like it very much. It's actually one of only three games I own that I haven't finished, the other two being Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. San Andreas is one of my all time favorite games, but I haven't beaten it or Vice City because they were translated to the PC with missions that are completely unbeatable without a gamepad, and being a first-person shooter addict, I don't own one. Yet. I still have plans to pick one up, if not to beat those games, then to help with all my emulated 16-bit games, particularly my Genesis games designed for that legendary 6-button pad released specifically for the Genesis ports of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2.
Occasionally I think about digging up all my old consoles and games and hooking them up to my already convoluted TV/DVD/VCR/Satellite/Stereo setup, and I get a headache just thinking about it and go back to whatever I was doing. That's called preserving nostalgia, and is not at all laziness.
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