Had an interesting weekend. My youngest loves first person shooters as much as he loves trains, so I bought DOOM 3 for his upcoming birthday. First problem, he has Windows 98, and ID Software has gone over to the Dark Side - DOOM 3 was written only for WINNT, either Win2k or WinXP. After seeing "wrong operating system, you won't be able to run this, install anyway?" I clicked on okay, go ahead, I'll see if I can figure out how to make it run on 98SE. So the next thing that comes up is "disk full". Mike has an 80 gig hard disk, but after creating a few hundred routes and painting 3 meg pictures with paintbrush a zillion times, he does tend to load up the disk. This time instead of spending several hours cleaning up his HD myself, I explained the properties window that shows used space versus free space, and told him to select and delete assorted routes and bitmaps until he got at least 10 gigs free. Mike is a high functioning autistic, and often goes where angels fear to tread, so the next thing I knew he had "non system disk or disk error" on bootup, he had deleted all his system files.I got a plan B for that, a complete backup of \Windows and the root files on another hard disk, so I restored his system after quite a bit of work and swapping hard disks around.Next I went web hunting, "DOOM 3 Windows 98", and sure enough found some genius hacker who figured out two bytes in the EXE file to make DOOM 3 run on any Windows version. I can't fathom why, if it will work with a simple hack, they chose to make it so XP or 2K was required? Possibly John Carmack bought stock in Microsoft and wants everybody to upgrade, this is the first from ID Software I've seen that has a 25 digit key code like Microsoft, and requires disk 1 in the drive as copy protection. Worst thing was the disk 1 asks for the keycode, "in the jewel case", yup, it's in there alright, but on the inside underneath disk 3.Anyway, after several false starts I finally got it installed, hacked, and running, and it looks worth the trouble.
One thing missing is a good sniper rifle, the early weapons are a pistol, shotgun, and light machine gun, and none of them do much damage until you get up close and personal with the bad guys. Hopefully there will be longer range weapons further on, I always prefer to pick them off from a distance. One cool thing is the bad guys, being demons, don't need light to see, so they tend to turn the lights out in a room before attacking sometimes.
You get a flashlight with an inexhaustable battery, only problem is you're apparently a one-armed Marine, since you can't hold the flashlight and pistol at the same time. That gets hairy, use the flashlight to find zombies hiding in dark corners, then quickly switch to the shotgun - and you're shooting in the dark, only catching glimpses of the target in the muzzle flash. You do get a few grenades early on in the easiest difficulty setting, so it's possible to do "reconnaissance by fire", toss a grenade around a corner and see if anything shoots back. Spooky atmosphere, great sounds, evil enemies and hazardous environments, what more could you ask?Worth the bucks IMAO.
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RE: I'm DOOMED, JonN, Oct-04-04, 10:41 PM, (1) RE: I'm DOOMED, Gecko, Oct-05-04, 00:41 AM, (2) RE: I'm DOOMED, BNSF4723, Oct-05-04, 08:20 AM, (3) RE: I'm DOOMED, sniper297, Oct-05-04, 05:11 PM, (4) RE: I'm DOOMED, Crossbuck, Oct-05-04, 07:32 PM, (5) RE: I'm DOOMED, Mousy, Oct-05-04, 07:41 PM, (6) RE: I'm DOOMED, sniper297, Oct-05-04, 11:53 PM, (7) RE: I'm DOOMED, Gixxer86g, Oct-06-04, 06:13 AM, (8) RE: I'm DOOMED, sniper297, Oct-06-04, 11:33 AM, (9) RE: I'm DOOMED, Jonatan, Oct-06-04, 12:19 PM, (10) RE: I'm DOOMED, sniper297, Oct-06-04, 03:17 PM, (11) RE: I'm DOOMED, Ben D, Oct-06-04, 04:06 PM, (12) RE: I'm DOOMED, Gixxer86g, Oct-06-04, 07:22 PM, (13) RE: I'm DOOMED, yellowdog, Oct-07-04, 09:53 AM, (14) RE: I'm DOOMED, sniper297, Oct-07-04, 10:52 PM, (15) RE: I'm DOOMED, Gixxer86g, Oct-13-04, 05:30 PM, (16) RE: I'm DOOMED, yellowdog, Oct-14-04, 10:45 AM, (17)
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I died six times trying to get from one airlock to another on this level, finally made it by memorizing the route and running as fast as I could without stopping to shoot flying monsters. There are air cannisters on the surface, I just don't know how to use them.
The visual effects are outstanding, at least that's one thing about ID software that hasn't changed. One thing I don't like is the constant spawning, you're sure you cleared an area and suddenly they pop up in all directions. If this thing has cooperative multiplayer it would help, when you're single player you get your back up against a wall and the wall drops down and zombies are shooting you in the back. I haven't read the docs to see if it has coop multiplayer yet, my LAN ain't working at the moment anyhow. Mike and I used to do team play against the AI bad guys in DOOM 1 &2 and Quake II, helps considerably when you're not the lone hero against all the evil minions. I'm wondering already if there's a mod for DOOM 3 that makes an easier difficulty level than "Recruit"! I can't imagine how anyone could play this on nightmare mode without cheating, even the easiest level is nuts. Thanks for the tip on the air cannisters, apparently I've been getting that extra 30 seconds and not noticing it. 30 seconds ain't very long when you get to be my age, I need all the time I can get just to think about which way to go!Mousy, I never tried GTA, altho one of my grandkids has a Playstation 2 with True Crime: Streets of LA, and of course as soon as Uncle Mikey tried it he wanted one too. No sniper rifle in that either. All the combat in DOOM 3 so far has been up close and personal, even the chain gun you shoot at someone 50 meters away and it don't really do any damage. Reminds me of the movie version of "Starship Troopers", the big bugs had no ranged weapons, only teeth and claws, so instead of getting a few hundred meters away and picking them off, these idiots were running toward the bugs with the assault rifles on full automatic, like they only had an effective range of 10 meters or so. When the bugs retreated, the troopers advanced to stay within range of the teeth and claws, THAT made a lot of sense. 
Not much of a train, two shorty cars.
"Station 2 will be the next stop, no smoking or shooting on the train."
Couldn't get the raildriver to work with this. 
There's only one train, why do they have signals?Looking at all this it occurred to me again that it's a shame John Carmack isn't a trainfan, we coulda had really great trainsims starting 10 years ago. That guy really knows how to make smooth realistic animation.
Hmmm, must be the end of the line!