Way, way in the back

With two kids around, I get much less time to play games than I used to. For what it's worth, here's my take on some of the stuff I've gotten around to.

I played through Half-Life 2. I would start my comments about this game by saying that it was an absolutely spectacular experience. An awesome game by almost any measure. After I've said that, however, I have to say something else. Something that nobody agrees with. That something is "Doom 3 was better".

On purely nuts-and-bolts aspects, the titles were comparable. The Doom 3 engine seems capable of producing slightly more complex scenes and effects, but the source engine (on which HL2 is built) is certainly no slouch in this department either. HL2 made up for the tiny gap in the graphics quality by actually providing light in the game, thereby allowing you to actually see the scenes. I point this out not to compain, but just to draw attention to it. At first when playing Doom 3, I added my voice to the cacophony of people screaming that the game was just too damn dark. At length, I came to see the pervasive darkness as one of the game's major features, and possibly as the game's only real innovation to the tried-and-true FPS gameplay formula. Others obviously came to part of this conclusion as well, since the most common word used to describe the overall "feel" of the game in the myriad reviews I've read is claustrophobic. As far as I can tell, I'm more or less alone in having come to appreciate how well Doom 3's atmosphere of isolation, confinement, and panic complemented the story, even if it came at the cost of the public perception of the game engine. (Note to Id software: License that engine to someone who promises to make big, bright, open, happy game, quick!)

In the "gameplay variety" category, HL2 really has to be considered the winner. It has a remarkable assortment of things to do, with vehicles to drive and complex machinery to operate. The gravity gun is really, really cool.

The story is where I feel the two titles really diverge. Doom 3, in my opinion, completely missed out on receiving the credit for having a vastly superior storyline when compared to HL2. I think I got about halfway through HL2 before I began to suspect that the game's creators were just not going to get around to answering such basic questions as "where am I?", "why am I here?" (the simple, non-philosophical version of this question), and "what events led to the current situation?". I turned out to be right. To top it all off, the end of the game just leaves everything hanging, without even the slightest whiff of resolution. I suppose there are people who appreciate this kind of narrative arc. As for me, I'm simply reminded of all the pointless hours I spent watching "X-Files", another story that always seemed like it was about to make sense (for those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, I can summarize it in its entirety thusly: "it never did make any sense"). It seems that, to some extent, all FPS games need to conform to a storyline that just plops you down in the middle of a situation and goes from there, but HL2's writers seem to have tried (and failed) to elevate this particular vice to a virtue. Their refusal to even attempt to constuct a beginning or an end to the story just came off like laziness.

Doom 3's story, on the other hand, is self-contained. It has a major plot twist about three quarters of the way through that makes you rethink the entire situation in interesting ways. It's shot through with little subplots that are universally entertaining. It's just plain better, and for me at least, it made all the difference.

I also picked up and played through the Doom 3 expansion pack, called "resurrection of evil", and found it disappointing. It has some new environments, new monsters, a new weapon and even a version of HL2's gravity gun, but was almost completely lacking in that wonderfully creepy atmosphere I descibed above. The best part of the game came early on, and used some scripted sequences to cause things in the environment to move around. It came at a time when you knew you were coming up on some new kind of monster, and would always happen just out of your main field of vision. By the time you looked in that direction, all you'd see would be a barrel or some boxes or something that just fell over. The feeling that something had just been there was palpable. The game needed about a hundred more moments like that, however, and they just weren't there. If what I'd liked about Doom3 had been the running and shooting parts, it would have been worth the $30 I paid for it. As it is, I wish I'd waited till it hit the $20 mark.