On the Subject of id

Christina Hendricks

So id Software has been bought by some big company bla bla boring shite. The news was met with a mixture of predictable end-of-the-world hand-wringing, but also with a fair amount of "yeah, whatever", shrugs.

Personally, I don't think id has done anything worth celebrating since Doom. Doom 1, that is, before the endless "Ultimate Doom", "Final Doom", "Doom 2" or especially "Doom 3" dead horse-beating. I'm just about willing to allow Quake 2 on the grounds that although I never played it, it tends to be fairly highly regarded. And it can't be much worse than Quake 1.
Essentially id have built a business around releasing engine tech demos poorly-disguised as games. Every big new release tends to accompany a new "id Tech" release, and then the various franchises are farmed out for some in-between filler games like Quake 4. The problem seems to be that while co-founder John Carmack is one of the undisputed legends of game engine development, id don't seem to have anyone working on the design side who operates at anywhere near the same level. I was especially amused to read the reports of John Romero's comments regarding the recent buy-out. Romero, who was notoriously drunk on his own ego when he quit id, and who went on to do nothing even remotely noteworthy. Unless you include projects that were noteworthy for being a big pile of shit, that is. Bit bitter are we, Johnny boy?

Doom 3 was the last big id release, and that's nearly 5 years old now. And it was tedious, repetitive, scripted, monster-closet-filled, pitch-black, no-flashlight-while-your-gun's-drawn, crap AI wank. The id fans loved it because it was called Doom and had the id logo on the box. Everyone else thought it was shit, but shit rendered by a nice engine.

The biggest issue I've had with id games, and it goes way back to the original Dooms, is their stuck-up, holier-than-thou attitude. They have an annoying habit of believing that only they know how to make good shooters, that only they make "serious" games for "serious" gamers, that everything else is just trivial nonsense and that if you disagree, the problem is with you, not their games. id games are Serious Business.
In fact while they've been innovative and influencial when it comes to engine technology and online gaming in particular, id games tend to suffer from a severe lack of creative inspiration. Their response to such criticism was basically Quake 3, which doesn't require creativity, or atmosphere, or a story, or characters, or immersive environments, because it's simply designed as a theatre in which Serious Gamers can waggle their cocks at each other to determine who has the biggest. Or least small, at any rate.

So what's on the horizon? Naturally the fans are salivating over the forthcoming Doom 4, because it's called Doom and has the id logo on the box. It will of course be shit. Yet another iteration of the same old, same old. More space marine fighting through hellish demons. So that will be exciting. But if the hundreth sequel of a series which didn't have the staying power to justify any at all isn't enough, they've actually summoned up the energy to create a whole new property. Unfortunately Rage looks, if anything, even more derivative and bland and boring than Doom. Mad Max meets Dune, or some shit like that. It'll be tiresome corridor shooting broken up by some pointless driving sequences. But it'll have the id logo on the box.
Not to mention both Doom 4 and Rage, by way of id Tech 5, will be multi-platform releases which means they will inevitably suffer from the usual compromises to pacing and AI that always accompany console shooters. It will be interesting to see how the fans react to that, probably they will just claim that since it's id, this is how shooters are supposed to play and if you disagree you just don't "get it".
But they utilise megatexturing, and that has "mega" in it, so it must be good.

On the Subject of Catching Up

Julie Soete

Now that I've got the girly pics out of my system, it's time to see what your esteemed Field Marshal has been up recently.

The Hunter

Still going strong, this one. It has reverted to full-on microtransactions now, with various new weapons and other bits and pieces being rolled out. At its heart is still the immensely immersive and surprisingly playable thinking-man's shooter it has always been. Rain has been re-implemented after early versions tended to crash the game, but now that I think about it I haven't had a crash in a long time. There's also a lot of statistics feedback, although I still don't quite get the correlation between an animal's score and what I see in-game, it seems a bit random.
Looking forward to them opening up the big island some time in the future.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

I finally got back into this after losing interest early on. Unfortunately I can't claim to have had some sort of revelatory experience but at least I've finished it now, and so I can move on to more interesting things.
It tries terribly hard to offer an involving storyline, but after the first couple of missions I found I was simply skipping all the briefings. They're not important, you just end up shooting at anything you can lock onto really. My biggest complaint, and probably a lot of people's, is still the shitty "assistance off" mode. Fortunately I found I could complete the game on "normal" difficulty without even having to use it. No doubt phags will immediately switch to the harder settings, and I can imagine dogfights might become quite painful, and possibly even impossible without it. It's so dumb though, all they have to do is allow for proper breaking and stalls from the cockpit views and it would be all good. I stand by my previous suspicion that they did it both to prevent the game being too easy (simpler to cripple the controls than develop better AI) and to show off the visuals.
Speaking of visuals, I wasn't exactly blown away. The ground detail in particular is shit. The game tends to look best during some of the big dogfights over large cities, where you're flying through multiple missile smoke trails illuminated by dawn/dusk sunlight. In the countryside/desert missions it's decidedly less impressive. In DX10 mode (which didn't even work on the Steam version for a long time) at least there's a slightly better sense of atmosphere.
So overall the game is fairly mediocre. The storyline aspects don't hold a candle to Strike Commander, it's a fairly straightforward arcade shooter with annoying control mechanics, and the graphics aren't all that great.

Cryostatis

Picked this up for free via an EVGA offer. In fact I had forgotten I had it until just now when I was trying to remember if there was anything else I had played recently. Not that I've played much, but so far my impressions are that the frame rates are bit low given the visual quality it offers. I'll try and remember to have another go and see if the actual game is any good.

Coming Soon

Overlord II should be a fun distraction if it's anything like the first. ARMA 2 could be a good tactical war shooter, but I'll probably wait until the price has dropped on Steam for that one. I might give the forthcoming free-to-play version of DDO a go, despite not having the most favourable recollections of the initial release. I've got a few more MMOs under my belt now, though, so perhaps it'll have something to offer.

Thought for the Evening: Maria Ozawa

Got 99 problems, but a lack of pictures of Maria Ozawa ain't one.

Thought for Later in the Day: Dee

Off of the (apparently) dead "puredee.com". She's (most often) blonde, she has a slightly nasty boob job, and I've tried to spare you the ones where she looks like a cheap tranny, but don't let any of that put you off.
I wonder whether her retirement was prompted by getting knocked up, murdered by a trucker, or another gender realignment op.

Thought for the Day: Kyla Cole

Long overdue, I know.