/vnt/ - Vidya & Tech

>>2
LUM-DOOM
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/graphics/lumdoom

Love DOOM and have loved it since I was a kid. Perhaps the game that basically had the greatest effect on my life.

The vanilla campaigns are great too, but what are you guys' favorite WADs?

For me I liked Equinox a lot. Action Doom 1 and 2 are nice too; they're basically DOOM WADs in the style of Contra and Double Dragon.

>>2
No joke, the first time I've ever seen Lum from Urusei Yatsura was from a shitpost Doom wad titled "CYBIE.WAD" aka Doomguy's Pimp Ventures.

>>2
I used to play doom when I was a kid. How are people playing these days? There are so many versions I get confused.

>I used to play doom when I was a kid. How are people playing these days?
by downloading a sourceport and running official WADs with it
sometimes they add community made maps or mods from places like cacowards or moddb
everything that you need is mentioned in 4chan's /vr/ sticky
for ports i'd recommend chocolate-doom if you are looking for something small and primitive and gzdoom if you wan't to play the latest mods and maps
the gzdoom is getting more and more like a full game engine and there are crazy projects for it
like project brutality and SALECO
the first one is amazing and brings gzdoom to it's limits, if you haven't heard of it before you won't belive that the gameplay is real
the second one brings your vidya cart to it's limits and also plays like a generic AAA crap
there are a lot of total conversion indie shooter on gzdoom and i am really pissed about all this
people like them because they are flashy but the gameplay is just mind numbing
they are also not really retro but it's a major part of "modern" doom modding scene so i decided to brought it up just so you know that there are a bunch of cool shit like that
the last WAD i have played is "altar of madness" from the latest cacoward
it's rather hard and may be difficult for someone who took a long break
how long have you been absent?

>>4
Ancient Aliens
Going Down
Eviternity
All three are amazing
>>6
I tend to use the DSDA sourceport these days. It runs amazingly well and has a new indexed lighting mode which means OpenGL looks like Software Rendering. It's great unless you want to play with game changing mods.
If you want mods you'll need to use the GZDoom source port, but the issue with that is it's kind of terribly optimized and my potato computer hates it.

>>7
Thanks for the tips, the /vr/ thread was indeed very helpful. I've been absent for maybe 20 years or so, I have only a memory of the aesthetic and feeling of the game. My objective at the moment is to play the original game, but I'll look into mods once I get through it.
I ended up using crispy-doom, it was available in the repos of my distro, so I simply installed it and pointed it to the IWADs. Couldn't have been simpler!
>>8
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll look into DSDA.

>>2
I still play doom from time to time using gzdoom, gzdoom is so good about "modernizing" an engine because isn't something overwhelming. Sad that this is quite buggy.
Also, about other retro shooters.
>Blood (1 only, 2 is shit)
>Shadow Warrior (the new 3D ones are absurdly trash)
>Duke Nukem (duh)
>Powerslave (both are good on their own)
>Rise of the Triad (the remake is actually decent)
>Hexen
>Heretic (only the first one, the rest is trash)
>Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri (this one is amazing)
>Descent
>Star Wars: Dark Forces

>>10
I think GZDoom is how I originally played Doom a decade ago on a fucking controller of all things. I'm still surprised my Doom 2 save is on my computer out of all the things I've saved from years ago.

Good list btw. I finished Blood last year after giving it another go and I REALLY liked it on my second attempt. I hated it back in 2019 due to how hard it was but once I got how it works (crouching, corner peaking, throwing dynamite) it was a very fun time. Although, I wish I played it after Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior. Going back to those felt like a huge downgrade.

I've tried playing a bit of Hexen but I haven't got that far in it yet. It's okay and hasn't clicked with me yet, but I need to actually give it a decent try instead of 4-5 levels.

>>10
Maaan, you can't have a retro FPS thread without Marathon!

Great game, very atmospheric and exploratory FPS, exploring the abandoned ship known as the Marathon and shooting down aliens known as the Pfhor. In that way it reminds me of System Shock. Even despite me being a diehard DOOM fan I must admit the art direction and graphics in Marathon were much, much, MUCH superior. Sadly originally only came out on Mac machines and sadly the developers fizzled out of existence, they sadly only made another couple of games on the Xbox called the Halo games... so sad what happened to them.

Frog blast the vent core!

As much as I like Doom, I think I actually prefer Spear of Destiny. It might be lacking in complexity and suffer from pretty monotonous map design in comparison (although it's an improvement over plain Wolfenstein 3D), but to me the weapons feel like they pack more of a wallop compared to the ones in Doom. Even the pistol feels satisfying to use compared to Doom's peashooter. The enemies feel less like bullet sponges and seem to react more when hit. I like the fact that almost all them use hitscan attacks too. One guard sneaking up behind you can mess you up badly or even kill you on the hardest setting if you're not careful. I find Doom's zombie enemies the most fun to kill, so I really like the idea of a whole game where most of the enemies feel similar except generally pose more of a threat.

Unfortunately, I can't go back to playing the game in its original form since I got so used to ECWolf's map feature. That's a seemingly minor improvement that makes a massive difference in playability.

The classic Doom games are my other favorite FPS games though. I usually stick with Chocolate Doom, Crispy Doom, or PRBoom+. I first started with Doom95, since it came with a CD I bought. After realizing that there were other options out there, I ended up missing the launcher. Only fairly recently did I discover that ZDL exists and that it's pretty much what I wanted. Too bad there are no GUI options for monster changing behavior like in Doom95 though. I tend to play on Ultraviolence with Fast Monsters enabled when I'm playing the original Doom or Doom II IWADs.

Unreal Tournament's probably up there too. I waited way too long to finally try that one. My family had a demo on our computer as a kid, but I was never allowed to actually play it. I remember being interested in he character creation feature but don't recall seeing the actual gameplay. It makes me wonder who put that on the computer in the first place since I don't actually remember watching anyone play it. It wasn't until a few years ago that I saw a YouTube video about it and decided to finally give the game a shot. I'm too scared to try it online, but it's fun to kill bots.

>>12
dogshit FPS that would have been better off as a book.

>>2
Does System Shock count? Might as well give some opinions for a bit of discussion. I finished it recently, really good game. Loved the music and sound effects and still listen to the OST on Youtube sometimes. Gameplay was an odd mix of turning aiming on and off so you could interact with the environment but I understood it really well by the end. My only gripes being with how grenades worked as I had no fucking clue how to throw them without damaging yourself. Loved exploring and trying to figure out where to go but I had to resort to a guide a lot, I had no idea how I was meant to figure out fixing the relay with the chip since I don't think there's a visual guide to the chip you need to fix it.

Loved the voice acting even if it was amateurish, it really added to the feeling of these people being normal employees in a way, instead of voice actors you sometimes get with games. Shodan has a really great voice and I'm glad I played it with the voices on, hearing her confused at this random entity fucking her plans up and getting increasingly angry with the Hacker, hell I loved the feeling of being alone on the ship with no one else alive except cyborgs while the only help you were getting was from distant messages from Earth. Really added to the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness but with a slight determination to stop Shodan. Also, super cool name for an antagonist.

The engine was really cool as well, coming out one year after Doom and it just felt so much more impressive to play around in. I did enjoy the small tidbits you could do with the game as well, picking up a pistol and unloading it for the ammo was pretty cool to work out, especially in situations when I was desperately low on ammo. I will say that by the middle of the game you're basically swimming in ammo and items. A shame since it really makes the game easy when before it was all about peeking corners and getting regenerators back up.

As for the remake (I know it's not retro but I might as well add it). I played right after, there was a lot I didn't like about it. The music wasn't the same or even remixed in a way that sounded like it. The atmospheric stuff just isn't as good. The enemy sound effects are MUCH better in the original when they're garbled robotic gibberish over "You cannot hide from me" or something. Also I thought Cyberspace was an improvement but man, it's really fucking not, the original was a weird gimmick stage but at least it was easy, the remake was fucking tedious. Some really confusing changes as well, not sure if it was because I was playing on 3333 on my first playthrough but I just questioned a lot of their choices. It's like 90% faithful really but I hope it doesn't totally overshadow the original since that's a unique game itself and honestly, it's sort of better than the remake. The remake is still pretty good but if I had a choice of a sequel in the style of SS:EE and the remake, I'd go for EE.