I've always felt a mite conflicted about Doom 2. I mean, it's amazing, of course... but I enjoy Doom 1 a little more. The new enemies in doom 2 turn the game into a much more bullet-spongey experience.

I can see where you're coming from with Quake. I love many things about it (Especially the art. Ahh, so very gritty and decayed :D), but the weapons really aren't as satisfying to use as the ones in Doom, and enemies aren't nearly as satisfying to shoot. A shame, because it's super good in every other respect.

Interesting that you consider Quake II the "real" Doom 3, because I've always felt that Doom 3 and Quake II played VERY similarly, in terms of combat. Right down to the use of darkness to hide enemies during gunplay--something Quake II actually did a fair amount of.

Also, I think Doom 3 is quite underrated. Sure, the originals are better, and sure it modernized some things that didn't need modernized... but it's still a really fun FPS.

I would say it's the GRAPHICS of GoldenEye which have aged poorly. The gameplay, level design, and many other elements still hold up pretty well, I would say; it's just tough to look at those character models now without cringing a bit -- and to be honest, they weren't very good-looking back in the day, either. The character animations were decent for the time, but the super-pointy people themselves BARELY looked any better than the super-pixelated polygon people in PlayStation games at the time. (And I still smile thinking of characters typing with hands curled into fists.) Perfect Dark looked damned AMAZING for a console game of its day -- and improved on GoldenEye in lots of ways -- but it still had this problem with the character models.
And I'd still rather play either of these than go back to almost any older "faux-3D", sprite-based shooter. :)

Doom was great, one of my absolute favorite games and the earliest game I even remember playing (and played it on EVERYTHING that was hackable, if a device was hackable Doom was on it). But I have to say Half-Life. I actually played it about three years ago all the way through for the first time, and was the first FPS game with an actual story that I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. And the mods, They Hunger 1 - 3 were just awesome!

Not just the graphics. The controls are quite clunky, and while you can get used to them, the absolutely atrocious framerate consistently throws a monkey wrench into gameplay. But it's the consistently awful, horribly unclear objectives and focus on trial and error--all the while lacking any sort of in-level save system--that make the game a chore to play. Nothing about the level design is particularly spectacular either, visually or functionally, especially when compared with the other games that have been mentioned in this thread. Gunplay is... satisfying, I suppose, if you can get past the aforementioned control and framerate issues. But again, it pales in comparison to both its predecessors and its contemporaries.

It's unfortunate too, because the game also has a lot of really good ideas. But they are buried under a mountain of irritations. Again, though, I will grant that the splitscreen multiplayer is loads of fun with the right group of people.

If System Shock 1 doesn't count: Duke Nukem 3D, followed by Doom 2 (using Doomsday Engine so you have to aim along both axes).

I don't know if I'd agree with the new enemies in Doom 2 being bullet-spongey, but I can see your point regardless. Doom 1's balance was so stunningly perfect that any addition risked messing it up. It also had far superior maps, as far as I'm concerned. Still, when I think of Doom 2 these days I include all the incredible user content in the equation - it's hard for me to seperate the two, now.


Regarding Doom 3, I actually love it to bits, in its own right. It's wonderfully atmospheric at times and a lot of fun to play. But it plays nothing like the first two in terms of pace, movement, balance, anything. Quake 2 does use some tricks from the same bag, I'd never thought about that but you're quite right. But it's also faster and more arcade-y, it gets movement down the same way the original Quake and Dooms did, and its balance of weapons and enemies is (while not quite at Doom's level) pretty spot on.

Doom 3 seems to me to be one of those (many, many) games that's brought down by its own name. People, myself included, went in expecting another Doom, and got something else entirely. I think it's a crying shame that they didn't just give it its own name, because nowadays it has a pretty terrible reputation that it absolutely does not deserve.

All of this is a little off-topic, I realise, but yeah...

Very interesting. I only ever played Quake (of the Quake games), and was so bored by it I never gave the others any attention. Quake really offended me, actually. I thought it was going to be equally awesome as or close to or even better than DOOM but taking place in a medieval setting (which I love the style and potential of way more than military or future-based settings) with expected improvements (because back then, to me, that is what made sense, you've achieved this with DOOM/DOOMII, now take all the good things and improve them and stick to the things that work and it should just be better. HAH!) It, to me, ended up being a total snore and bore hype machine. Yeah, it was good enough to play through, barely, but it was nothing special, at all, and that left a bad taste in my mouth because it was getting so much praise and notoriety and I didn't think it was anything to write home about. I remember starting it and simply saying to myself "well they must have had a few crappy maps and that is what they put at the beginning", and then at about level 4 or 5 I started to get really bored and was going "where is the awesome game I'm supposed to be playing?!" and then by level 12 it was more like "okay, get through it already, how many of these damn things are there?" To me, the game felt like a walk-through museum with monsters around for you to kill for some reason. Snore-bore! Duke 3D was wayyyyy better, I played it twice through while drudging through Quake. I got Redneck Rampage shortly after that and never went back to Quake or its sequals. And then I got into RPGs and realized FPS were not really my bag as much as other types. They just didn't have enough depth or variety for what I was looking for. I have Quake II and III on steam, maybe I'll give them a try someday, beacuse you saying that about Quake II makes me a little upset I missed playing it. I played a demo of Half-Life way back when it was released, and it was a lot of fun, but it never sold me on buying it compared to other games that had longer play times and more stimulation for my brain.

You have put me in the mood to play Quake II again :P

Goldeneye on N64, no matter the platform !