REVIEW:'Doom 3' a Terrifying Experience

AP via The Greenville Sun ^ | August 10, 2004 | MATT SLAGLE

[ChadGore]

Woohooo ! I'll try in tonight.

I'm in one Gig of RAM ,on a 2.7 ghtz P4, through a ATI Rad 9700 with 128 Meg.

[Shryke]

Exactly my system, with an Athlon. You are going to freak out. You owe me a beer.

[ChadGore]

Re: You owe me a beer.

You're on !

[StoneColdGOP]

I must live vicariously through the gaming experiences of others.

Sigh... I must as well.

Doom 3 bump...

[diamond6]

Does anybody out there have or play Metal Gear Solid?
My hubby got to the end of the first disk and has a question.

[Xenalyte]

[Bacon Man]

That picture seems a little lonely. You forget to add something underneath it?

[Dog Gone]

This is the first PC game that I literally leaped back from the monitor while playing. I'm lucky I didn't poop my pants.

I have a high end PC that can easily handle the ultra graphics, and I can swear that those are real monsters who want to kill me.

Three thumbs up for Doom III.

[xm177e2]

One nice touch adds a great deal of tension: you have a flashlight that never runs out of power, but you can't use it at the same time as your weapons.

That's why you bind your mouse buttons:
MOUSE2: pistol, then chainsaw
MOUSE4: shotgun (you want to be able to pull this one out quickly)
MOUSE3 (press the mouse wheel), MWHEELUP, and MWHEELDOWN should go to other weapons, like the sub gun or the plasma rifle.

That way, you can run around with your flashlight out, and not have to worry about getting to your weapons.

Doom3 is very disappointing in that the enemies do not react to the light from your flashlight (so you never have an incentive to turn it off) and, as the author says, they aren't very smart. I haven't gotten extremely far into the game, but they never seem to be actively hunting me, they just follow scripts and then charge at me when they see me. Having stupid enemies lessens the fear factor by a lot. The only thing you really have to worry about is monters being teleport-spammed in.

I upgraded my graphics card just to play this game, and it was worth it, because the graphics are beautiful, especially the way shadows are cast. Heat flare is neat-o, too.

If HL2 is as good as promised, it will blow Doom3 out of the water. We'll just have to wait and see.

[Dog Gone]

If you have played Counterstrike, you're gonna love how it plays on the new Halflife2 engine.

Check out this sneak peek

[Dog Gone]

There is a beta driver for download at the ATI site. When running Doom 3 on ultra high graphics and bumping it up to a 1280 x 1024 resolution, the game was crashing even on my advanced system. Downloading the driver fixed that problem and now it's unbelievably good.

I know three people who have downloaded it and none had a problem with it, even though it's still officially beta.

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/wxp-w2k-DOOM-HOTFIX-8-05-040727a-017086E.exe

[xm177e2]

Wow, that looks really nice. Does anyone know how much of a vidcard you will need to play games with the HL2 engine?

[Dog Gone]

Minimum system requirements appear to be a 1.2 gigahertz processor with 256 megabytes of RAM and a DirectX 7 video card. The recommended spec is 2 gigahertz or higher processor, 512 megabytes of RAM and a DirectX 9 video card.

By all accounts, ATI cards are performing best.

[xm177e2]

I've got a 128MB FX 5700. I bought it for Doom3. If I'd known how much better the Radeon cards are for HL, I would have gotten one of those :-(

[Dog Gone]

You'll probably be okay unless you run into me in one of the online games. But I sometimes have trouble shooting straight, so maybe it will be even.

[RandallFlagg]

You and me both....

BUMP!

[IoCaster]

Thanks for the ping, Skooz.

I'm always on the road and sometimes it's difficult for me to keep up with all of the things that go on in this forum.

As far as Doom 3 is concerned, it's the best single player game that I've played in a very long time. I own and have played, Half-Life, Deus Ex 1+2, Serious Sam, Unreal 1+2, UT up to UT 2K4, NOLF 1+2, MoH, CoD, Painkiller and Far Cry. All of these games are great fun.

Doom 3 stands out in my estimation as a Best of Class and it r0x0rs past the pretenders. There is something so visceral and compelling about this game that drives me to play it. The sound, atmosphere and creepiness factor alone are worth the price of admission to me. Have fun with this one folks.

GG...id Software!!

[IoCaster]

Doom3 is very disappointing in that the enemies do not react to the light from your flashlight (so you never have an incentive to turn it off) and, as the author says, they aren't very smart.

I'd have to respectfully disagree with you here. I'm not sure why my experience was different, but they sure as sh!t reacted to my flashlight. I have certainly shined the old beamer into a far off dark corner and spurred some zombie to the attack on many occasions. Perhaps it's dependant on the particular type of enemy or something?

[xm177e2]

Usually it's just if you get near enough to them. For instance, I shined my flashlight down on a zombie snacking on a corpse, and he didn't notice, but when i got near him (not necessarily within his line of sight!) he came stumbling out after me. I think the whole thing is proximity.

[xm177e2]

There is something so visceral and compelling about this game that drives me to play it.

I just don't feel that when I play Doom 3. I am, however, compelled by Natural Selection, a free mod for Half-Life.