so I'm working on my big game and decided to play some of the older FPS games for research
to see if I missed anything now that I'm old and everything

and I feel Doom3 is a good fit for this site - despite having the best graphics of it's time
the games combat is a complete trainwreck

I feel it's important to see what makes a game a total trainwreck
so we can learn from the mistakes when make our own games
and make entirely different mistakes..
which possibly other people can learn from
and make pointless blogposts about

anyway this is not a review -- just some notes I wrote:

strangely enough in BFG edition they decided to give more ambient
to the game -- which kind of ruined the one aspect
many people loved (just fixing the flashlight would have been enough)
anyway I decided to play through the original instead with a source port (dhewm3)

you can get pickups from little password protected vaults
and you supposed to get the passwords by listening to audio logs
and reading emails of PDAs you collect

of course on a second playthrough you probably don't remember these
and don't feel like listening to them again
not to mention some codes were tied to - now defunct - websites
so nearly everyone just ended up using the codes from walkthroughs
which is kind of a reminder to times when people had to look up
copy protection from manuals

PDAs seem to be like an amusing idea - but they replaced the colored keys
probably to be more realistic
they are realistically put on the floor so they are hard to see
now this is confusing so they made up for it by you only
need to get close to them to pick them up
and there is usually only a single locked door

the shotgun spreads bullets all around the corridor - to fill them
with one of the ugliest decals I ever seen

the lost souls (including the improved ones in resurrection of evil)
disappear in the most unceremonious way possible
(in a smoke poof so small you can hardly see it)

they found the most annoying pistol sound one possibly can
(you feel truly in hell after every reload )

many enemies don't react to hitting you at all
zombies do a little animation - without losing any momentum
possessed soldiers just keep shooting at you
and they dissolve into atoms with one shotgun shot
and every time they brain appears intact and falls on the floor

technical note: they still used the quake1 map format for the bsp levels
it's built into the game exe but it's pretty much just a radiant editor
this game is a technical marvel in more ways than one - I mean
for this clunky editor even making a single empty room is a challenge
people who make levels for id engine games are truly a hardcore bunch

the enemy design is the least of the problems with this game
yet the sequels seem to have this idea that the problem
was that they didn't look enough like their original counterparts from 1 and 2

in the end even with the plastic look the game still looks really good today