T w e n t y S i d e d

I loved all the crazy science machines spread throughout the complex. We were all used to videogames where we explored mostly static worlds, so these massive pounding, spinning, glowing, shaking machines really were something new. Their moving parts cast crazy shadows on the walls that really showed off the engine and gave monsters fun places to hide. Their deadly interiors made for a feeling of paranoia at the ongoing hazard. Their moving parts provided a fun justification for the various “puzzles” you have to overcome. As the guy who’s in charge of walking around in videogames asking, “What is this thing FOR?!?”, I loved that the game took time to do some fun worldbuilding by explaining their purpose. Okay, everyone thinks it’s completely superfluous worldbuilding, but I loved it anyway.

So I see Chris has quite the organizational system for his savegames. “ASDF” and “ASDFW”. I’m in the habit of naming my first save “new” or “start”, but then I’m too lazy to make another, so I replace it as I go. Eventually I have a save just before the final encounter in the game labeled “start”. Which means my system is objectively worse. Chris names his saves gibberish, but I give them completely wrong and misleading names that will no doubt confuse my later self.

How do you name saves?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In this playthrough, Chris is keeping things fast and interesting by skipping all the “secret” containers. What you’re supposed to do is listen to all of the audiologs and read all the emails to find the cabinet codes, and use those to unlock the item stashes. I imagine that most of us – trained by years of item-scarcity mechanics – reflexively did all that work without doing any sort of cost / benefit analysis. In my case, I frequently found myself popping open containers to find everything inside was useless to me. I was maxed out on the offered bullets, my health was topped off, and I really only needed a fraction of the armor pickups. But I kept opening them anyway because that’s how you do things in a videogame.

So here 11 years after the fact I’m really glad to see that the cabinets really do make a huge difference. Halfway through this episode is the point where I was able to start using the shotgun exclusively. Now I see Chris skip the containers and wind up completely starved for ammo. I guess I’m just glad to know all that hassle wasn’t a complete waste, only mostly a waste.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I can’t convey the sadness that I missed out on our Doom 3 session. I’ve wanted to talk about this game for ages. While I don’t hold up Doom 3 as a timeless classic or anything, I really do think this game did a lot of things right. I’d even go so far as to say the first couple of hours are really enjoyable. It doesn’t feel anything like what we expect DOOM to feel like, but viewed as its own thing it actually does a good job of setting a mood and letting you explore freely at the start. This is very preferable to the more modern approach of having lots of flow-breaking cutscenes and bossing you around with waypoint markers.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.