Tag: Doom

Spring 2018 LAN was goood

The weather this weekend was pure shit.  rain, then snow, then rain, then snow, then a lot of snow and all shit until late today.

We played all day Friday and Saturday and I think my eyes bled while I slept fitfully last night with the retinal burn.   Here’s what we got in on.

Zandorum Doom 2: both Free for All and vs the Monsters.  If you are an FPS player and haven’t played doom multiplayer to see just how fast an FPS can (and probably should) be, play Doom 2!  However, all the tricky giant maps with all the key searching was fucking annoying when playing with 5+ people.  Getting lost in Doom isn’t so bad because you rocket through the level, but when there’s a hidden door that leads to the other 50% of a level where everyone else is at, and you can’t find the fucking thing even with the map, it’s real annoying.

Quake Super8.  Maurice!Bastard got the multiplayer working with this excellent visual mod for Quake.  This one looks THE BEST and closest to my favorite Quake renderer:  Verite Quake, built specifically for the Verite video card.

Unreal Tournament 4:  This was the most balanced deathmatch that we played.  I had a ton of fun with this and it worked very well for the LAN, which is a rarity with new FPS games which are nearly all anti-LAN (Quake Champions for example) and take forever to get from one map to the next so players can get their ‘prizes for playing.’  This is most of a UT game, basically the team that was working on it went to go work on fortnight and it may never be worked on again.  Remember what happened to UT3 after Gears of War came out…

Quake 3: While far more balanced than Quake, I still like the original Quake better.  Q3 is super tight deathmatch though.

PUBG and the goddamn pubg event.  There was an event this weekend where you could drop into a small area of the first pubg map with a group of 10 players and fight until a certain number of kills were scored by a team.  While it gave a chance to use a bunch of weapons and constantly fight.  It was pretty frustrating most of the time.

Company of Heroes.  This was the only RTS we played and since people had seen me on steam playing PA:Titans, that was a no go.  People were OVER concerned at my skill at COH as well and it became obvious only after I was soundly beaten in a 3 vs 1 game.  This isn’t a super hardcore RTS and is pretty n00b friendly with the pacing and defensive nature of the game, so good for the LAN.  I really expected to be playing Dawn of War 3 instead of this but man– what happened to that game? Aesthetically awesome, but the gameplay was trash.

There was a mess of video captured during the proceedings, so I’ll get some posted as soon as possible for your viewing pleasure.  mraak.

Fall LAN of MRAAAK

We played a lot of Quake and zDOOM and, inevitably, we played some PUBG while all sitting in a room. Hilarity ensued as we found out just how bad, collectively, we are at military shooters.

There will be a bunch more videos posted by various sundry persons that attended the LAN, and I’ll place these here where applicable.

THE LAN THE LAN THE LAN 2017

Last weekend was a LAN weekend. Man it’s been awhile, some suspect a decade or more. We did it up in the basement of scooter’s abode and it was gibbing madness. Some of these games I hadn’t played in a looooong time so here’s a run down of my feels here in 2017.

FPS
We played a mess of FPS games, originally thinking we would run the gauntlet of Doom all the way to new Doom.  We almost did, but there were games we skipped (and one we shoulda skipped!).

L4D2

Always a great time, but not great when you have more than four players as the monsters aren’t fun to play as. Interesting? Yes, but you end up looking at the respawn screen a lot more than if you are one of the survivors.

Vermintide

We gave this a try at the LAN and got pretty confused by the maps and environment.  This is one that is likely better not at a LAN and just in normal internet play.

The Bad Place

Quake

While unbalanced weapon-wise Quake is an amazing death match game STILL in 2017. We used the RUNE mod which has runes lying around that you can pick up that give you X2 damage, damage resistance, rapid fire (not my favorite) and regeneration. I would argue that Quake still has some of the best Death match maps ever made.

DOOM
We tried to get BRUTAL DOOM up and running and it desynched constantly. While we didn’t deathmatch this, it was fun for the hour or so we were able to actually play. Brutal DOOM is something to check out for sure.

Quake 3

The penultimate death-match FPS. While many have tried, nothing has come close to how good this game is for straight up death match. With the weapon balance that Quake lacks and some really awesome DM levels, I think we played this the most out of any of the FPS games over the weekend. It just shows that it’s not the graphics that make a good DM game at all.

Insurgency
I didn’t get on this, but people said it was a good time. We played this because we could not get Battlefield Bad Company 2 working for everyone, which was too bad.

this is the screen you LOVE to see in newDoom because it’s over and you can go on to any other FPS!

New DOOM

Playing Quake, Quake 3, UT3 and OG Doom just before trying newDoom showed how awful the death match for the New Doom really is. Great single player, amazing graphics still makes newDoom a fantastic game, but don’t bother at all with the death match. It feels like you are inside a robot suit slowly moving and turning around. It’s not even worth trying out to see how bad it is.

UT3
I got a single round of Vehicle CTF with maurice!Bastard and it was great. While UT3 is not a very good Death match game compared to nearly all other games (it’s still better than NewDoom), I’ve always found it’s Vehicle CTF to be absolutely superb. Totally insane vehicles, very fast movement speed across large maps and the whole bevy of weapons that UT brings to the table makes me wish I had the chance to play this more.

RTS

We played three RTS games and all three were enjoyed, though one for very different reasons for the other two.

Planetary Annihilation

This is on the cusp of being a good game, and certainly it’s fun for a bit.  However there is just so much going on and you are spread out over so many areas (planets and strategic layers) with your units and buildings that it makes it an unmanageable mess.  We got in a few games of this vs the bots and after winning easily on normal, we tried it on hard and it was comedy.   The bots ended up nuking our commanders on a planet we had total control over.   Overall, fun but the game devolves into ALL orbital combat after awhile.  There’s minutia and counters here, but it is all just a unit-flood steamroll of some sort in the end.

Warcraft 3

The best RTS had to get busted out.  We played coop again vs the bots and I forget that this has a very steep learning curve to it with the heroes and creeping and total disregard for the base-defense that other RTS games rely on.  I also forgot nearly everything I had known about the game and played terribly, but still, really fun game– especially the battles.

Total Annihilation

People begged to bust this out and..was a total joke.  We jumped into the game with 5 players and two of the commanders were D-cannon’ed within the first minute.  RTS games have come a long, long way.  While Starcraft, due to updates, stands the test of time with it’s controls and UI, Total Annihilation does not at all.  As compelling as it was in the 90’s it just is not any more.  Frankly if you want the TA feels, Supreme Commander is the way to go these days.

CRPG

We got in some Torchlight 2 both Hardcore Elite and non-Hardcore Veteran.  While the chance of permadeath is fun, the MASS hitpoints the enemies have in Elite multiplayer makes it slower than I really like in my TL2 madness.

So yes, we should do it again but bring some candles or votives or something for the rump gasping.  There’s only so much bad air a basement can hold before spontaneous human combustion sets in.

May: DOOM and Total War Warhammer

May 2016 is shaping up to be a very important month for PC gaming. Two absolutely critical titles are hitting the streets in the next couple weeks and it looks like i’m going to have to take a few days off to cope with it physically and emotionally.

First up is DOOM. While watching some of the gameplay videos, one should not that this is not a speedy game like the original, it is dead slow in comparison. That said, it does not go the route of horror FPS that Doom 3 does, more like a slow moving Serious Sam with awesome looking kill shots and death animations. While the slowness, especially for the Doom franchise, is sad, I am very excited for the game. I even pre–ordered it due to getting Wolfenstein for free.

Second will be the biggest times suck for me of 2016 outside of Master of Orion– Warhammer Total War. Set in the new destroyed Old World that many of us hold dear from our youths playing WFRP and Mordheim, there’s not a Sigmarine to be seen anywhere, which is a great thing. CA took more time to develop the game after what looked like a Fall 2015 launch, and if Rome 2’s launch and fix cycle is any indication, this is a good thing. While I expect there to be bugs, it should be nothing like the catastrophic launch of Rome 2 (which, while it took them a year, they finally fixed to create an amazing game in the end). The main thing here is that CA is doing things they’ve never, ever done with the TW game (see below).

So yeah, if I don’t show up for stuff in the next couple months, you know what I’m doing!