Doom 3 is now officially the second game that I've had to take a break from playing because it was too scary. The other one was the original Thief.

I wanted to play for several hours tonight because I'm out of town all weekend and I wanted to satisfy the itch before leaving. But I could only play for about an hour and a half before the intensity of all the scary stuff made me too jittery to continue. Thief got to me with its overall atmosphere of creepiness (Thief 3 only did that to me for one level), but Doom 3 has that creepy atmosphere *plus* all the cheap-scare moments. Individually, the cheap startles are no big deal, but cumulatively, they really get to you.

I think a big part of it was the immersive sound environment. I'm only using stereo headphones, but they're those Fontopias so they have really good bass response and they blot out all other sounds in the room so I get really immersed in the game. And there's enough 3d positioning cues in the stereo field so that I've got a pretty good handle on where the sounds are coming from, even if they're behind me. I've had more than one moment of distinctly hearing a growl from behind and doing a 180-and-fire-in-a-panic move. Boy it's been a long time since a game made me do that.

One of the rooms I entered was deliberately designed so that the sounds would get to you. There was a bunch of venting pipes and machinery, which were deliberately making noises that were hard to distinguish from the monster's noises. So I made my way through this room constantly getting startled by stuff that was just machinery. But then around that *next* column, bam, another monster. I'm now in the habit of cursing the level designers when they "get" me like that. Evil genius bastards.

Jumping in your chair, getting goose bumps, getting so immersed in a game that it produces physical responses... Not many games give you that.

If I can only tolerate an hour or two's worth of gameplay per night, it's going to take me a while to finish this game... I'm not even half way through yet. I'm told you get the BFG at about the halfway mark, and I don't have it yet...

Awesome. Hey would you mind posted the specs of your machine? The game looks gorgeous and I'm sure its got some insane requirements. I've got a p4 with 128 mb ATI 9700 and want to make sure it will run at a decent setting before I shell out $50. I'm assuming you havn't tried multiplayer yet?

Invest in some more memory and you should be fine. 128Mb is nowhere near enough these days. Treat yourself to a 1Gb upgrade.

Edit: Unless the 128Mb you mentioned is the video card memory

I have a 2.4GHz with 1GB RAM and a 9700 Pro (128MB). I'm running the game at 800x600 on Medium quality. Nothing fancy, but the game looks good enough and plays smoothly.

On a completely unrelated and coincidental topic, NASA just got a new linux supercomputer...

I know what you're talking about in Thief 3 - The Cradle level. Would you say that Doom 3 is scarier than that level? That one had me really freaked out. Several times, I was picking locks, and had to stop midway through just to make sure nothing was coming for me. I couldn't finish the level until it was day time again.

The original Thief almost gave me a heart attack. I wasn't expecting it at all, but there is one part where you walk over some corpses, and the jump up and start eating you. I had to turn the machine off and left the room and watched TV... I never watch TV

I've been taking a lot of breaks playing Doom 3... The sound effects just really creep me out, and that is with some cheeseball headphones that came with the UT2004 Special Edition. I ordered some new speakers after hearing how much the game benefits from good speakers. Now I'm wondering if that was a good move...

Overall, the atmosphere in Doom 3 is phenomenal. From jumping just because a corpse falls over a lip, to the insane amount of anticipation because lights start clicking off one at a time. They did an awesome job with this game.

I'll try the headphone thing tonight, I have been using a pair of 5 $ speakers since my Altec Lansings blew up.

Unfortunately I am due for a major video upgrade as I can only run comfortably in 800x600 at low quality. I am using a ti4200 64 mb ram, 2500 barton with 512 mb ram.

Doom 3 is the scariest game I have played, is there anyway to kill those imps that leap at you before they do any damage?

The thing that gets me is trying to shoot zombies (even at their snail's pace) in the pitch black. I hate to waste shotgun shells when the pistol will extinguish them easily enough, but I have to be able to see what's coming for me first.

Well, I have to agree that it is scary, and very creepy at times too, though not as much as the undead levels of Thief I and II and the aformentioned Cradle level of Thief III (and let me throw in Alone In The Dark as being one of the scariest games ever.) And the graphics and sound are great, with some decent eye candy, smooth monster animation, good playability and well done voice acting. Kudos to all of that. (P4 2.4ghz, 9700 AIW, 2 gigs memory, and plays smoothly, for those interested)

But I am still extremely disappointed in this game. It is just so tedious, the level design is some of the most boring and unimiginative I have EVER seen, and I mean all the way back to the start of the FPS genre. It reminds me of a quote from another old game "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." The entire game so far consists of me going into a smallish room with random machinery working and some steam coming out of a vent, having me get to some point in the room where the trigger is, having some sound happen or the lights go out or the screen go all red, and have the monsters appear out of a "monster closet" or just randomly out of thin air, killing them, going down a small passage to another mid-size room, and repeat ad-nauseum. That is 90% of the game right there so far, and I have played for many hours. I don't have a problem with making things suprise you like that every now and then, but it really is a cheap trick, like the kind that bad horror movies use, and they just do it over and over and over again.

It's funny, they use a lot of monsters inspiried by the ones in Dooms I and II, and it just reminds me of when I saw those monsters originally and how good those levels were compared to these; despite the few textures and small number of polygons, they showed infinitely more imagination.

In any event, the game is fun enough for me to continue, and I understand that eventually it changes to another location, though I have not seen it yet, so I will keep going in the hopes it gets better. But if you have 60 bucks to burn and are looking for a good FPS game, might I suggest ignoring the hype and get Call Of Duty or Farcry instead, which are much better games.

"locales"

It was context. The Doom 3 locals are already pretty exotic. If that's not going to keep him happy, I don't think Half Life 2 tripods are gonna get it done for him.

Beanpole lives!

Of course. Edited the typo.

Sweetness. I'll have to install it at the beginning of the next level.

I should mention that about 2/3 of the way through, the level design does indeed get more interesting. It just takes a Hell of a long time to get there.

Edit: I won....I won't be playing it again I think.

Wow, haven't been here in a while.... anyway been playing Doom 3 and I'm stuck at the enpro facility, where the 3 lift stations are... Any one know how to get out? Any help would be greatly appreciated...

I have the exact same specs and took it up to 1024x768 and it plays at a nearly identical speed.

ok... just figured out that the little lift thing, has wow, lift controls! Can't believe it took 2 hours to figure that one out.... ugh...

Negative Doom 3 review, FWIW. Look in the "news" section below the strip.

From that, and from what else has been written here, I don't think that I'll be spending any money on Doom 3. The graphics look fantastic (which means that I would need a new video card anyway ) but I like my games to play well. From what I'm seeing it just doesn't match up to RTCW or BF1942 in terms of gameplay.

From the screenshots I saw before the release, that had always been my guessed-at opinion. I think Half-Life 2 looks a lot more interesting. Of course, I'd love it if they'd make new Infocom games, so what do I know?

The Doom 3 gameplay has exceeded my expectations. Yes, it's a lot of creeping around dark hallways and shooting things that jump out at you. Which doesn't sound very fun when you describe it that way. But it is. I find the gameplay to be intense, engrossing, entertaining, and very much worth the price of admission. Your mileage may vary.

I even like having to switch back and forth between the flashlight and the gun. It enhances the feeling of being surrounded by dark creepy things and not knowing what's going to jump out from around the next corner.

On the other hand, you're a big FPS fan anyway, whereas I'm not. FPS by itself doesn't really turn me on, so there's got to be a lot more to it to draw my interest, and it seems there isn't.

Did you ever get into America's Army? I loved that one for its realism. No respawning, 2 hits and you're dead, heartbeat effects aim, etc. Very team based as well. I'd get nervous playing that game because I couldn't just find a health pack to get back in the game. It took me quite a while to get used to the pace of BF1942 (and weak graffics) but I love that one because you can fly, drive, run, etc.

[creepy-disembodied-whisper-female-voice]over here... come on .... follow me[/creepy-disembodied-whisper-female-voice]
that's enough for me tonight ... holy crap ... that voice alone is going to give me nightmares ... and the dripping/chewing/blood/meat sounds in surround sound after it speaks? [shiver/]

Edit: Worth noting that the sound in this game is absolutely phenomenal. The ambient sounds are so well done and the three dimensionality is incredible (the Zalmans really do work, though i feel like i get a better sense of front-back if I wear them off-center, pushed further back -- makes the rear speakers more rear). There's all these noises going on around you, and that damn creepy voice is positioned in surround sound such that it appears to be inside your own head. Nice touch. There have been quite a few times when i can hear something coming up behind me (the little spiders clicking, breathing, or some cheap-yet-effective scare tactic) and I do the Tony Fabris trademarked fearful-spin-and-shoot maneuver. A huge part of the success/enjoyment of this game, I believe, is the audio experience.

About the sound... did Nine Inch Nails end up doing anything on Doom 3? I heard talk they were, but that was like 3 years ago.

EDIT: Answer to my own question.

Radeon 7000, 32MB?

An Nvidia GeForce 3 graphics card or ATI Technologies 8500
A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 150o
384MB of memory
Two GB of hard drive space