What single player FPS campaign are you playing?

[Exhuminator]

Closest thing we got to a Black sequel was "Bodycount" on 360. It was clearly inspired by the game.

[TSTR]

Closest thing we got to a Black sequel was "Bodycount" on 360. It was clearly inspired by the game.

Was it any good tho?

[Exhuminator]

I don't know, I haven't played it yet. Just passing on what I've heard from others and seen in screenshots.

[Xeogred]

The asylum stage (7 I believe) is my favorite so far. Wow, it was intense, enemies everywhere and some of those open areas with multiple stories got chaotic. Felt like a badass not dying in that level, came very close a few times though.

I love how over the top the window placement and sound effects are haha, but I love it.

I love me some Burnout, but it is kind of a shame these guys have been chained down to racing games all this time. This is proof they could probably cook up some other cool stuff, or could have done an official sequel like you guys said.

[Ack]

Sometime back, Popo was kind enough to gift me a copy of a little-known FPS on Steam called Eradicator. I finally fired it up this weekend, and I gotta say, I am impressed!

The game was released in 1996, and it has that slightly awkward 3D that you would find in games like Redneck Rampage, Duke Nukem 3D, and Dark Forces. Eradicator also includes an inventory system which has some unusual items in it. Some, like the grav boots, I understood immediately, but other items I don't get at all. I see elements of Doom in the game's progression(level by level in a facility, with a map noting my progress) and Quake in the plot(an automated factory has cut back on and is launching humans for their biological matter to produce killer cyborgs). But what I really like is the option of picking from a handful of playable characters to get through the game, each with unique weaponry and a different starting level to the game. Fun times!

[Xeogred]

So that makes me wonder, what other games back then were more "locked in" pseudo 3D like Doom's perfect style? Also, I never ever play Doom with mouselook on, that's just graphically game breaking and ugly as heck. No jumping allowed either.

I still think Doom is aesthetically and visually one of the most pleasing games of all time. I love Duke 3D, but mouse look and the weird vertical scaling does make it more aged and chunkier in ways. The levels are also a lot tricker to figure out sometimes, especially Shadow Warrior. But I guess that's a little subjective since people get lost in Doom too lol, but it's a different kind of struggle to me.

[MrPopo]

So that makes me wonder, what other games back then were more "locked in" pseudo 3D like Doom's perfect style? Also, I never ever play Doom with mouselook on, that's just graphically game breaking and ugly as heck. No jumping allowed either.

I use mouselook when I play on source ports but I agree with leaving jumping off. Turning on mouselook, aside from the hilarity with enemy sprites, is mostly just to make things feel better, as you still get that vertical auto aim. The main place where it matters is against the Icon of Sin. But jumping does break a lot of level design.

But basically every pre-Quake FPS was in the 2.5D style. Quake's main selling feature was the fact it was 100% true 3D.

[Xeogred]

So are the Build engine games the rare ones that had mouse look back then? I could probably get into anything else that doesn't have that.

[MrPopo]

Dark Forces doesn't have modern mouselook but it does allow you to pan the view up and down (though it still has that vertical auto aim). Heretic and Hexen are straight upgrades to the Doom engine, along with Stryfe, but they also feature a limited look up and down system (and the levels tend to be more vertical to emphasize this). Marathon does use mouselook, so that's more of the Build engine style. It was something devs wanted to do; Catacomb and Wolf 3D both don't need it since there's only a single plane but once Doom introduced variations on the vertical access (even if it was still a proper 2D map when viewed from above), not to mention the earlier Ultima Underworld, people wanted to allow people to look up and down in these first person games.

[Ack]

And those are just the big names. There are a lot of lesser known Doom clones like Ken's Labyrinth, Chex Quest, Pathways into Darkness, and so on that don't use the Mouse much or at all. A good rule of thumb is anything pre-1996 will likely not require the mouse to play.