Notices by Louis (extentofthejam@mastodon.social), page 2

I’m at the end of Hexen’s third hub world. This game is better than I’ve given it credit for. The puzzle solving is a fair amount of logic, recognizing patterns, and deduction. I haven’t hit a part yet that was like “how the hell was I supposed to know that?!”. It also pushes the Doom engine almost into Build territory #doom #boomershooters #dosgaming

What’s Starfield? Is that like a new screen saver?

@dosnostalgic my favorite from back then was the John Muir part of Sam and Max

@dosnostalgic this is what my hamburgers see

@dosnostalgic yeah that is true — those might be alright changes. It’s definitely one of the enemies that I’ve always found pretty annoying to deal with

I think the parasites have near-unlimited range too now. They were obnoxious enough before, they didn’t need the help

Fucking hell, no wonder I’m having such a bad time. Between this and the goofy new no-range-limit ridiculous-area-of-effect berserker jump attack, I’m thinking the remaster shouldn’t have tinkered with balance stuff.

@dosnostalgic very cool

Yeah I’ve gotten to the point in Q2 where they’re just constantly spawning high damage enemies behind you. Bleh. What a slog.

Pretty good so far! 4 levels in

I’m gonna switch to Dusk. Hopefully it lives up to the hype.

@dosnostalgic yeah, a lot of the enemies basically get free hits and track you perfectly. I don’t mind the tankiness. The lack of stunning enemies has always bugged me a lot in this and Half Life. There’s a lot of “are my hits even registering?”. The rapidity of which your health can drain from instant attacks is an issue, especially with enemies that spawn behind you later. I do like a lot of the game but it has a lot of bullshit too, and near the end they really pile it on.

Biggest issue with Quake 2 for me is that it’s getting to that FPS era where there are a lot of parts where you don’t stand a chance unless you know what’s coming next. Doom, especially Doom 1, was so continuously, fluidly playable without worrying about saving. A lot of very smart design decisions about weapon balance and enemy behavior made that work and even the Build games didn’t exactly have it.

@dosnostalgic yeah I notice his are often the gimmicky “we have one specific way to play this map in mind” stuff or city maps which were cooler back then. Quake 1 is mostly a miss with me but I did enjoy it more last time I played through it. I liked that most maps had multiple angles of attack, something 100% missing in Q2.

@dosnostalgic and by the end of the 90s it had practically killed Sun!

@dosnostalgic I’m impressed with it as far as how it compares to other late 90s fps design in terms of flow and fairness, but it’s still not quite Doom. A couple of the new episodes are worthwhile, some are crap. There was one I was particularly impressed by that I could try to find the name of.

All my free time has gone into Quake 2 lately

@dosnostalgic we had this on a rival platform which shall not be named

@dosnostalgic if you want to go full Barbenheimer you could have the next table all draped in black and playing Balance of Power

@dosnostalgic I respect this a lot though. Most traditional musicians can’t deal with trackers. He has both great music theory chops and knows his way around a sound chip.