Ok so that was just a title that popped into my head, nothing about this ramble is going to be remotely poetic. Or even a limerick, maybe I’ll do haiku at the end.

I thought I should just do a ramble to break up all the literary shade I’ve been throwing you folks over the past however long and I really can’t be bothered to do another knife review or even buy another knife. Shit I just spent like a hundred quid on a new blender, what the fuck am I doing with my life?

Right so topic, topic. Ok I recently bought the game Doom, and I thought I could complain/praise that and maybe spin it into a blog here and abouts a ponies worth of words (500, at least I think, need to take another course on cockney rhyming slang).

Ok (gotta stop starting new paragraphs with ok, I was talking to someone on xbox live ((i.e. the only human contact I get)) and I kept starting every sentence with ‘basically’ or ‘essentially’ which are basically essentially the same word and I wanted to strangle myself with a kitty print draft excluder). I really actually enjoyed this game, I haven’t completed it yet but I had some minor gripes about this game and shooters today in general.
Because to be perfectly honest with you I preferred Doom 3 to this and let me tell you why before you rectally examine me with a verbal steel toe cap. It had atmosphere, yeah the game is dated now and it was pretty shitty even then, like lame haunted house half-life knock off. But I really enjoyed it, it rang so hard of event horizon I couldn’t help but love it. And if Doom 3 had the awesome gameplay of the new Doom it would win hands down.

Opening a dimensional portal on mars to hell is super cool so how did Bethesda make it shit and boring?
Well in Doom 3 the hell research was sort of hush-hush, it built up gradually and you didn’t really know what was going on and you read audio logs that documented the slow descent into hell and madness. It was a mining operation that was experimenting with teleportation and accidentally opened a gateway to hell in an ancient Martian ruin.
In Doom they’re actually purposefully trying to get to hell to frack some demon gas, I’m not even kidding. There are like holograms saying how it’s all super cool and safe and awesome to open a portal to hell to nick their idemon chargers.

I mean seriously is this game for real? How would that ever make sense? It’s just ridiculous, no janitor working for no three-fiddy an hour would mop the floors of a mars base where they’re openly telling everyone they’re opening a gateway into hell to steal their unobtainium. I mean how could it go wrong?

So the first strike for me is Doom 3 took it in stride and played it closer to the chest and had better atmosphere and actually tried to be scary. The new Doom doesn’t give a shit, it’s just a balls out shooter. Which I like, but it really missed an opportunity to be more than a shooter and surpass Doom 3.
I feel a twinge of disappointment whenever I start a new shooter and literally two seconds in you’re mashing a zombie or I’m sorry a ‘Possessed”s head into mushy peas. Whatever happened to the half life style of games where there’s actual build up and the action seems to flow organically? You’re not just given a gun and a slap on the bum. It’s insulting. I want set up, I want atmosphere and I want tension.

I think the day I noticed the real immersive shooter experience was dead was Farcry 3. The trailers were this intense looking fps that looked like a game of the movie The Beach. A group of holiday goers having fun get snatched by guerillas and have to fight and adapt to survive. But as soon as you start the game you’ve already been captured, no build up, no character development, you’re just kicked onto an open stage with your pants down. And then the cheek of the game reaches peak when you’re told to save your friends in the game that hasn’t introduced you to them yet. How can you want to save someone if you don’t even get to know them at all? You’re actually in the cage with your brother and he dies right in front of you and the game expects you to care, I like met him two minutes ago and he was only really there as a tutorial.
Then I started to realise they don’t really care, and ubisoft in general is pretty lazy, willing to literally copy and paste their games into shiny new sky boxes selling them at full price with a hackneyed plot ripped right out of Michael Moore’s asshole. Yeah when we say ‘Sequel’ we mean an actual sequel not the same game where everyone is wearing different hats.

I’m really enjoying the game, it just makes me sad to think shooters used to be so much more than this and they’ll never be like that again. It’s fun, the guns are great, the monsters are great, the action is heart pounding. But I used to play games I felt that people really cared about when they made them. Now I’m not so sure.

Doom is a fun game
Lots of mindless gore and shit
Seven out of ten.

Peace!