Will Doom 3 revive the struggling PC Gaming Industry?

CNN:Money ^ | July 14, 2004 | Chris Morris

[Paradox]

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Since 2000, developer id Software has told the world the next installment of "Doom," the game that kicked off the action genre, would ship "when it's done."

Good news, gamers: It's done. In the lexicon of the industry, "Doom 3" has gone gold.That means with id Software's work done, publisher Activision is duplicating copies to ship to retail. What it all boils down to is you'll be able to pick up a copy at retail on Aug. 5, though some stores could start selling the game as early as Aug. 3.

[TheLion]

Minimum Ram will probably be 256K.

[Ichneumon]

"STATIC!" Everquest has over 400,000 monthly subscribers.

I've been playing Everquest for over four years now, it never gets old.

[Cultural Jihad]

Anyone ever play Bullfrog's "Magic Carpet" from 1994? It featured terraforming, 3D stereoscopic rendering, etc. The game was dependent on the 486 PC's clock, and when the Pentium processor came out it killed the game because it then played too fast.

[RandallFlagg]

I-sure-wish-they'd-update-the-Doom3-website-BUMP!

[COEXERJ145]

Video card I want is the new nVidia GeForce 6800. Of course it only costs $600.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

I'm not much into gaming, but I do remember all the hype about doom way back when. At that time, I was into Bungie software's "Marathon." I remember hearing about how much better Doom was going to be. When it finally came out, I was extremely disappointed. It was nowhere near as good as Marathon. Neither Doom version I've seen has anywhere near as good a storyline as the Marathon series. I wish them luck on Doom III, but its going to have to be better than Halo 2 to go anywhere.

[RandallFlagg]

MMmmm. Looks tasty!

[RandallFlagg]

Doom 3 and Half Life 2 will both be released on the XBox platform.


Just in case no one heard my last post about this fact.

[COEXERJ145]

In WWIIOL I was an Axis grunt, Hellcatx. You could usually find me playing defense with my favorite towns to defend being Sedan and Vireaux. Put my Flak-36 on the hill overlooking the river and Vireaux was safe. The two towns I hated defending were Anhee and Dun as it always seemed like the Frenchies were trying to cap them and the army base was far from the town.

You limies and your Matilda II's always give me fits. I hated coming around a corner and running into that lumbering behemoth

Do you remember the time a bunch of WWIIOLers went over in-mass to DU and filled their forum up with Pro-Bush, Pro-America messages? It got so bad at DU that they actually sent an e-mail to CRS saying that if they didn't tell their members to stop and prohibit the use of the WWIIOL forums for planning DU disruptions, they would sue CRS.

[Ouachita]

Will the horror NEVER end???

[RogueIsland]

Excellent game. I played it the second time not too long ago. I managed to do all of the things right that I should have done the first time. I managed to complete many of the subquests, and that made for a much better story and a lot more action. Great game. I would have liked to be able to max out on force abilities on both light and dark, but that might take the fun out.

I played it through two additional times to get most of the remaining subquests as well (Carth's son, Carth romance [female PC], Bastila romance light/dark [male PC -- just HAD to get Bastila to tell me she wanted to be my lover and apprentice, after all], Juhani slaver quest, and of course the Yuthura redemption quest which is really one of the nicest little surprises in the game).

If you have the PC version, there are some really fun mods available. Most of them overpower your character, but if you're replaying just to get quests you missed the first time, this isn't such a bad thing sometimes. There's a save game editor that's useful for hacking skills, for instance, which will save you from having to start over to accomplish certain tasks (for instance, I hacked a high Persuade on one of my "quest for the quests" runs because it was the only way I found to accomplish a couple of the sidequests the way I wanted). Plus, it's just silly fun the third time around to be able to just take Darth Malak to school at the end (go, tap your captive Jedi, punk, I'll be here when you get back to lay some more lightsaber smack on you, you Darkside puke).

[RandallFlagg]

BWAAAHAHAHAAA!!!! Ya GOTTA send that to Hannity!

[GreenLanternCorps]

ATTENTION EVERYONE

When I got home tonight, what should be waiting for me but the new issue of PC Gamer, with a review of Doom 3.

The Highlights:

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Id Software
Publisher: Activision
Required: P4 1.5Ghz or equivalent, 384MB RAM, Radeon 9800 card (Certain GPUs - lowest level is GeForce3/GeForce4 MX)
We Recommend: 2Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9800 card, five0-channel sound card and speakers.
Maximum Players:4
ESRB Rating: M

Score: 94% (Editor's Choice)
Highs: "Extraordinary Graphics and sound; incerdible tension, atmosphere, and mayhem."
Lows: "Some stabs a humor fall a bit flat."
Bottom Line: "Just as we'd hoped, it's a non stop ride of tension, carnage, and terror. A new classic."

"One of our test systems had a GeForce 6800 and ran flawlessly at 1024x768 resolution with high detail (a higher level of detail quality and resolution is available, but the PC to run in well isn't!)"

-Dan Morris, PC Gamer, Volume 9, Number 11, September 2004
Pages: 34-44

[Rastus]

Sometimes bumping the refresh rate helps. I still get sick if I try to play older games, though. I recently reinstalled the original DOOM, and I get a headache if I try to play more than one level.

[RandallFlagg]

OH, DROOOOOLLLL!!!!!
Thanks.

[Cloud William]

386 DX (oh yeah that MATHCO addition was worth it)

IIRC, you had to have a DX machine in order to get Wing Commander to run, especially with the voice pack. :-)

[wolficatZ]

All the latest demos can be found here for download; the Swedish and Dutch servers are usually fast and reliable

 

http://www.gamershell.com/download_demo.shtml    RTS military buffs should try the latest "D-Day"  demo

 

 

 

and FPSers have to try "Joint Operations:Typhoon Rising". It is pretty impressive (kind of like Far Cry,Flashpoint and BF1942) and the free demo supports 100+ (!) players

and still runs very smooth on my rig. Usually you can jump into a low ping server with 60-100 players in a few seconds.

 

 

 

http://www.gamershell.com/download_6191.shtml

 

   

[POA2]

GR is a great game - especially with all the new mods out there (http://www.ghostrecon.net/) - a great site -

Though it looks like GR2 which is coming out this NOV is going to be a real bust - (somewhat like RVS is to the Rainbow Six ) - the new GR2 seems to be more of a run around and shoot game....much less realism.

[Moose4]

Sedan, huh? I was in 3CD for a while...you ever play around Namur or Andenne? :)

Man, I remember one of the campaigns that lasted about eight or nine weeks. For 3 or 4 of them, we were fighting between the Namur/Andenne/Huy/Anhee/Profondeville area, back and forth, night after night, hanging on by our toenails against everything that particular portion of the Axis players could throw at us. That's one of those times that made a truly persistent game like WWIIOL (as opposed to one of the arena-based ones like, say, BF1942) really great. 3CD *OWNED* Namur. That was OUR town, our AO, and you'd have to roll over our virtual dead bodies to take it. (And French jokes aside, it was nice to see them actually rewrite history and win against the Blitzkrieg. The guys who played the French were the hardest-core mothers in the game to stand up under all the crap they took.)

I hated Anhee and Huy both. Nothing like getting shelled by Pz IIIH fire from the cliffs overlooking town. For days. Continuously. Andenne was a hell of a town to fight in, less of the cliff shelling and more straight-up fights.

I remember you from the forums. I didn't know you got banned, I thought you'd just had enough and quit.

I never heard about the WWIIOL crowd hitting DU, but I don't doubt it. A bunch of them started playing a small MMOG called "Second Life" and ended up largely getting banned and censored for putting pro-Republican messages, Confederate flags, and WWIIOL advertising bitmaps on the outside of their player-built dwellings. (Second Life's developers were from San Francisco...need I say more?)

}:-)4

[RedWing9]

Heh Heh Heh Heh Heh, he said spodefly.