phelot said:
A matter of taste I suppose. The Marathon aliens were designed by a medical student who used his knowledge of anatomy in his designs. The result is truly alien looking... aliens that are also believable. And compilers aren't scarY?! The first time I rounded a corner and saw one of those things on a terminal, I didn't know what the fuck to do. It didn't respond to anything until I bumped it and it turned around and flashed me. Holy fuck.
I'm not looking for 'believable' in my sf shooters, i am looking for gritty, nasty, with claws and blood and shit all over the place. System Shock monsters were much more scary, even though the basic zombies looked like those hunchbacked bums from Fallout.
phelot said:
Doom monsters are just plain dumb. Like you fight against retarded kids with sharp teeth. idk, I guess the zombies soldiers and those pink demons can be fucking scary, but all the bosses were lame, even back then.
Yes, they are dumb, and the bosses are lame (the ending of the first episode in Doom 1 was particularly disappointing), BUT, here is exactly why (especially in Final Doom and Doom 2) i love the way Doom maps are constructed. They take monsters with very basic AI and attack routines and use them in ways that make you want to scream at the top of your lungs both out of brief flashes of fear and frustration due to dying (yet again).
Don't remember any sophistication coming from Marathon monsters, either, although they do have all the limited space going for them, i guess.
Eh. I guess. Doom relies on traps and hidden doors filled with baddies, while Marathon relied on the claustrophobic corridors and sheer darkness. I suppose that's what I liked about it.
Yup. Don't get me wrong, Marathon does what it does very well, it's just not appealing to the adrenaline junkie in me.
Doom doesn't have overpowered weapons?!
Aye, but, except in Doom 1, they do not hinder the gameplay by making the game easy.
Bear in mind that i always play Doom with
fast monsters and on Ultraviolence. Beating WADs that were designed to turn their players into enraged piles of refuse (like Hell Revealed) on those settings kinda recalibrates one's perception of difficulty.
You should try playing Marathon 2 multiplayer, it really is a blast even after all these years. A lot of fun type games like kill the guy with the ball and king of the hill.
Might try it, thanks for the tip.
Overall, i'd say those games are just too different to successfully compare. They're both shooters, but accomplish the task of entertaining their players in very different ways. I'll retract my somewhat ridiculing tone of the previous post, though, i get easily agitated when i see Doom under threat.
And the Marathon games are good enough not to deserve being brought down, even if i don't enjoy them as much as i do Doom.