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| In praise of: DOOM 3 by Jerry Whorebach 04/06/2014, 5:55am PDT | ||||
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Released in April of 2005, Vicarious Visions' Doom 3 for Xbox was a phenomenal port, and one of the finest first-person shooters of that console generation. It addressed several of the complaints gamers had about the original 2004 PC version - the excessive length, the oppressive darkness - while adding the ability to play the entire campaign in co-op. Based on my initial experience with id Software's Doom 3: BFG Edition for Xbox 360, I am incredibly glad I didn't trade in my copy of Doom 3 for Xbox. In this thread, I intend to document all the ways in which the latter was superior, starting with the controls.
Left Thumbstick: Move This is Doom 3 for Xbox. Sprint on left trigger. Flashlight on left bumper. Four user-configurable weapon hotkeys. No unused buttons. Overall, a comfortable and intuitive layout, as you would expect from a developer who specialized in making complex console titles like Tony Hawk and Jet Set Radio playable on your goddamn Game Boy. Left Thumbstick: Move This is Doom 3: BFG Edition. Sprinting - something you will want to do a lot of, and in all eight directions - requires holding down the same thumbstick you use to move. This is both awkward as hell* and very bad for the life of your thumbstick. What should be one of the two most frequently used buttons on your controller, the left trigger, is now a toggle for the new armor-mounted flashlight. Surely that's the sort of button you should only need to press once per game, since there's literally no situation in which more light wouldn't be helpful?** Well, you'd think that, except the flashlight seems to extinguish itself periodically for no apparent reason (I'm sure there's a reason that will become clear to me once I play it some more, but I'm equally sure it's going to be a completely fucking stupid reason, possibly relating to technical incompetence). Conspicuously absent is any way to quickly select a specific weapon; instead, all you can do is cycle through them one by one using the bumpers. This is because the new special weapons from the expansion pack levels are permanently mapped to the D-Pad, which is bad enough for the expansion pack levels but downright inexcusable for the main campaign. Worst of all, the B button is left unassigned! Wouldn't it have made a perfect "favourite weapon" button? That way you could at least swap between your favourite weapon and whichever one you were using last. (If they didn't want to allow any user configurability at all, they could have gotten 90% of the same utility by just making B the "shotgun/not shotgun" button.) [*Call of Duty maps sprint to the left trigger, but in Call of Duty you're only clicking it once to initiate a "realistic" run, which takes you a limited distance in one direction - you're not holding it down while you scoot back and forth dodging fireballs. The necessity of clicking the stick in COD is also used as a balancing factor, a temporary dexterity cost akin to the joystick motions required to perform special attacks in Street Fighter. Doom 3 was obviously never balanced around this cost - it has an "always run" option, for Christ's sake, but only in deathmatch! - making its inclusion here pure hassle.] [**If you think the monsters might factor visibility into their basic proximity detection, congratulations, your childlike imagination hasn't yet been snuffed out by years of dreary video games.] I have complaints about the brightness slider, too (no reset to default option, and if it's anything like id's last game, Rage, the changes are saved to your gamer profile instead of a local file*, so you can't EVEN delete the whole configuration and start over), but those would be nitpicking compared to the game-crippling effect of shit controller mapping. Also, probably nitpicking in general. It's just the sort of thing you think about when you're not having fun. [*This is the equivalent of a Windows game saving its settings to the registry. Except, you can get a clean registry by reinstalling Windows, whereas you're stuck loading a bloated gamer profile on every boot for the life of Xbox Live as a service - or at least as long as you want to retain access to your digitally purchased content.] |
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