Recently I received a gift from a friend of mine in Steam gift for Heretic/Hexen bundle. As a gamer who never have a chance to play Heretic/Hexen when it comes out for the first time I gladly accept the gift and start playing it, in chronological order of course.

Problem arose after I played Heretic for almost an hour. I start getting headache and I felt like I'm going to throw up. I stopped playing and I have to use hot balm on my neck and lying down a for little bit.

I already have this problem when I played certain FPS games. Mostly old FPS games. The list:

Half Life 1
Blood (or One Unit Whole BLOOD)
Black (FPS)
Doom(1, 2 and Final)
Heretic (Note: I don't try Hexen yet, but I'm afraid the result will be the same)
Mario 64

I heard some people also have this problem. Is there any kind of explanation for this problem? Also is there a solution to stop the headache/nausea or at least reduce it?

Extra note: Funny thing is, I'm fine with most modern FPS. I played BF3 for hours and no headache or nausea at all.

The thing that gets me nauseous with old FPSs is the constant bobbing up and down while walking. I know they tried to simulate movement, but it just messes up my inner ear and causes the problems you described. As far as I know, there is no solution as it's hardcoded. This would also explain why you don't have problems with modern FPSs, which for the most part decided the ditch the gimmick.

I get sick because of the excessive viewbobbing of some old games and small fov on some new games like Half Life 2. Try to use sourceports that allow disabling viewbobbing like zdoom or gzdoom for playing Doom/Heretic/Hexen (set movebob to 0 in the console). It should be possible to disable it in Half Life 1 by setting cl_bob to 0 in the console. Another possibility is to try different fov settings.

[Edit]
It is impossible to disable viewbobbing in blood. The only solution seems to play only short amounts of time and take breaks often.

This article discusses several possible causes for your problem:

http://www.daleisphere.com/video-game-induced-nausea-dizziness-and-headaches/

Thanks for the link, good thing I have a big bottle of ax brand liquid balm and maybe a good fizzy drink. I'm not fond of Ginger Ale taste though. I also need to try the fan technique.

But I realize the head bobbing exist in Heretic, and the fact that fps are quite messy in that game. Maybe that's why I got dizzy in less than an hour. With Half Life it's around 2-3 hours and Mario 64 it's 6 hours. Blood also less than an hour.

It's difficult to pin down because there are several different factors. Here are some major ones:

* Overly smooth movement keyboard-based FPS
* Excessive bobbing (this is ironic because the whole point was to lessen the discomfort cased by the above factor, but it causes the same problem.)
* Incorrect FoV. When games portray the camera as being "your eyes" but have a projected center of rotation that's too far from your head it creates dissonance.

For most of those games there are engine remakes which you may find far more playable. Often, simply adding mouselook is enough to keep motion sickness away for many players.

True, I realize Heretic has this head bobbing effect. And no option to turn it off on the menu.

Also the fact that the control is weird made me doing a very uncomfortable posture. Yep, both Heretic and Blood don't have head bobbing on/off option. I can play them for at least 30 minutes or 1 hour max. I wonder how I finish those games then..... Thank you for the link, appreciate it.

Not wanting to laugh at the expense of the OP - I hope you find a solution to your problem - I actually sincerely thought that there were FPS games called Headache and Nausea from the title.

Hey, what can you expect from a genre that has names of negative things for titles like Doom, Quake, Rage, Blood, Crysis and FEAR?

Overly smooth.... so like Wolfenstein 3D?

Excessive bobbing, yes I notice that in Blood and Heretic.

Incorrect FoV. So I have to sit further from the screen?

What is mouselook? Hehehehe, I hope Cliff Blezinski see this thread title and make a game with that title XD

If it's running at over 60fps, it's possible that your brain is interpreting that as actual movement while your body isn't moving, and your mind can't put 2 and 2 together subconsciously. If you have some kind of frame limiter in your game, might be worth dropping it to 30fps or even 24-25fps and seeing if that helps. It's the same effect that gives films their filmy-look.

You can use the Doomsday Engine to run Heretic, and the configuration options there allow you to set a different FOV. That's basically the angle from your point of view that you can see on the screen. So if you have a 360 FOV set, you can see all around you. An 180 FOV is akin to a fisheye view. 90° is normal for old-fashioned 4:3 monitors, 105-110 for 16:9.

You use the mouse to move your perspective around as opposed to the keyboard.

Exactly right on both counts

Maybe. If the FoV is to wide then sitting closer can help. If it's too narrow then sitting further away might be better. With some games it doesn't really make a difference. But if a game is causing trouble for you it's easy enough to try leaning forward or back to see if it helps.

When you use the mouse to control where you're looking. Since Quake most games do this.

Thank you all for your help, Also thank you for MonstaMunch and his old thread who full of tips to put my nausea under control.

Also Jamyskis for your link for Doomsday Engine. Too bad I can't mark two posts for solution. so here a +1 for you.

Cheers!