Generally the deadlines are tight, and much of the writing has to done before the game itself is locked down, without the author necessarily getting much/any chance to play it. Mostly though, they suck, and it's often not the author's fault. Very occasionally, some of them are good, like Under a Killing Moon, where the author got to put back lots of the story that was cut from the game, or a few of the Halo novels. Some are merely mediocre, like the Gabriel Knight books, which offer better writing but really just retell a story that you already know in a form that it wasn't intended to be enjoyed in. Most game novelisations absolutely stink, from Tiberium Wars (where the main character gets the nickname 'Puke' and things get worse from there) through to the truly godawful Baldur's Gate 2. Wang stood and turned to face the gunmen, knives in both hands. And the businessman needed to be alive to tell the story of the great Japanese restaurant shoot-out. He would someday have grandchildren who needed a story. There was no point in letting the businessman be killed. No." It was as if he was scolding a misbehaving child. With a finger wagging at the man, he said, "No. Doom was huge after all, and sillier games than that have seen novelisations-arguably the silliest of them being the two Shadow Warrior novels about Lo Wang, Duke Nukem's racist cousin. Now, the fact there's a book isn't entirely surprising. Doom did in fact spawn four novels, plus the infamous comicbook, and there are a couple more based on Doom 3. Or not.Īs with a few other episodes, let's start with a quick disclaimer: I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. Truly, this may be the most underrated series in Western Literature. How could it not spawn a set of four novels? Only if it had spawned five, just to really explain its philosophical underpinnings and clarify its take on the quintessential existential crises in a world where the Devil exists and has a shotgun. They were metaphors for life itself, from Central Processing representing the doomed folly of seeking ultimate control, to the searing portrayal of nihilism versus optimism in the wittily named "Military Base". Its levels were more than mere shooting galleries. In Doom, we had not merely gaming's Citizen Kane, but its Ulysses, its Plato, and its Lady Chatterley's Lover. When I think of deep in-game narrative, I think of Doom. It's that they wrote four of the damned things. The surprising thing isn't that they wrote one. The enhanced versions of Doom and Doom 2 are actually separate from the existing releases: If you already own them on, they'll be added to your collection as Doom Classic (2019 Release) and Doom 2 (2019 Release), and if not, you'll get both the original DOS-based versions and the new enhanced editions if you purchase them in the future.įor the full rundown of changes in the Doom and Doom 2 updates, hit up the patch notes at .įrom 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about bringing random obscure games back into the light. Some of these enhancements, like the new quicksave option and the Quick Weapon Select menu on the d-pad, are primarily for console versions of the game (you're not playing Doom 2 with a controller, are you?) but they're all available on the PC editions available through the launcher as well. For QA purposes, WAD creators will not be able to upload their own content through the system, but Bethesda said that it's "already begun tracking down members of the Doom community to discuss releasing their add-ons, and hope to release many more in the future."ĭoom and Doom 2 have also been enhanced to run at 60 fps instead of 35 fps as they did originally, and have been given new qualify-of-life features including better level selection functionality and an aspect ratio option that will stretch the display vertically to match the 4:3 aspect ratio of the original releases. Bethesda said that other add-ons, both professional and fan-made, will be drawn from throughout the past 25 years, and all of it will be free. The first batch of add-on content will include The Plutonia Experiment and TNT: Evilution, which came together in 1996 as Final Doom, and Sigil, released last year by original Doom designer John Romero. Now Bethesda has brought some of that functionality to the game, minus the hassle of dicking around with a DOS prompt, with the addition of support for "add-ons," a curated list of official Doom and Doom 2 content plus "some of the best community episodes and megawads," that will be accessible from the main menu of both games. The original Doom and Doom 2 were great shooters in their own right, but what made them enduring was their support for external WADs-new levels created by fans and shared through pre-internet BBSes and commercially available CD collections.
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