Somewhat excited about this release. I didn’t exactly love American McGee’s Alice to death. Really great atmosphere. Outstanding, unique characters. But I was disappointed with the frustrating gap in difficulty levels. Easy - way too easy. Medium - a bit harder. Hard - close to unbeatable unless you have the reflexes of a puma. Nightmare - simply unplayable. Still, I definitely want to see how EA has updated this very cool game.
First actual gameplay shown! See two more videos Here
Worst Doom Clones I’ve ever played
#1 - Extreme Paintbrawl
Here’s a game obviously trying to capitalize on a fad sport (leave it to Activision to publish something so erroneously “market friendly”). Gracing most Top 10 if not most Top 5 lists of “Worst PC Games of All-Time”, Extreme Paintbrawl is something really special to behold. If there were a college course teaching you how NOT to design AI, this would be lesson one. Teammates tend to be beyond useless, if not outright traitorous. And enemies if even remotely close to a seemingly harmless environmental object just sort of seize and twitch until you peg them with crappily rendered paint blotches. So incessant bugs and atrocious AI aside… this game still blows! There are zero even mildly redeeming qualities. It’s as if some designer/programmer at Creative Carnage had some weird personal vendetta against the sport of Paintball and made this game in an effort to defame it. Truly a mystery.
Huh? This is a game? I’m confused. I feel like that poor guy chained to the wall in the first level (‘Meeeehhh’). I think I recall someone blaming this game’s lack of success to the fact that it was released only a few months after Doom in 1993. No. Not at all. This game flopped because it was an affront to the first person shooter genre. Poor AI. No strafing. Sad weapons. And oh my god, the sound effects. For whatever reason, I masochistically played this game a good ways through. I would have had a more productive day banging my head against the wall. Good grief.
I don’t even know where to start. The insipid level design through which only Magellan can navigate? The sometimes unresponsive sometimes overly sensitive controls? The monotonous hordes of stupid-looking, uncreative enemies? How bout the fact that you’re supposed to be a modern, awesome special forces type guy, and you end up shooting rats in a dungeoneous sewer through most of the early stages of the game? The only reason it’s not #1 on this list of worst doom clones is because of one sort of redeeming quality - the tolerable music. That’s about it. Stay very very far away from this title unless you’re a sadistic collector of atrocious games.
Just because you wrote a sub-par, yet popular novel series, doesn’t mean your game license is going to be any good, William Shatner. In fact, it’s god awful. You step off the train in the first sequence wondering…”Who is shooting me? Why are they shooting me? Who am I suppose to shoot? And who keeps shrieking like that?” To be honest, I actually shoot the civilians just so they shut up. Anyway. This game is terrible. Whoever thought using photo-realistic sprites was a good idea (em, Mortal Kombat, I’m looking in your direction) was grossly mistaken. It’s sloppy, lazy and never led to anything other than poor game design. F-.
I don’t even watch Lost and found this rather amusing
Ok. Terrible graphics. Unresponsive controls (can’t shoot and move at the same time). Ridiculous enemies. Completely nonsensical storyline. The only thing that gives this game any kind of street cred is that Ken Silverman was the creator at age 18. He went on to use a similar game engine for Apogee’s Duke Nukem 3D and Blood. For whatever reason, this little failed pre-college experiment was still published and sold. *Cringe*
Note: Most of these don’t use the Doom engine but are obviously inspired by either Doom or Wolfenstein 3D. So I will just generalize with an easy taxonomic genre: Doom clone.
This one was a no-brainer for the top spot. I don’t even think words can do this masterpiece justice. Just play it with good headphones in a dark room and you’ll understand.
Remember Street Fighter II and all of Capcom’s other superb console games? Could one of their best selling franchises really port to the PC? Yes, it could. And it did. In my option, the PC version was just as good as the Playstation. You could even plug in a joypad and play it the same way. All in all, this is the game that pretty much brought the survival horror genre into the mainstream. Really brilliant in every aspect. Logical puzzles. Terrifying zombies. And moments that just made you jump out of your seat no matter how many scary movies you’d seen or games you’d played. A real triumph in gaming history.
An anthology chronicling the history and magic that is and was PC games. It's the good, the bad, and the ugly - and a true testament to why we still play today.
