AlexMax
01-04-2003, 07:37 PM
I typed this humerous comparison of DOOM vs Halo up last night. Keep in mind that any namecalling is not directed at anyone and in fact this whole article is meant in a humerous view so :blah: . Enjoy
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There are huge debates surrounding Halo. Some say it's the best game ever made for any system. Some say it's the most revolutionary FPS game ever. In this article however, we are going to see how Halo stands up before the old grandaddy of the title 'most revolutionary FPS game ever'.
Which game? DOOM. This has been also given similar titles, and it has been released many many years before. So how does Halo stack up against it? Let's find out.
Gameplay
--------
They are similar games, gameplay-wise. Get from point A to point B while killing all monsters in the middle. DOOM's keycard puzzles and switch pulls are really no different than Halo's 'puzzles', except Halo guides you with the AI construct. Which you would have to be really stupid to use, since evereything either has an arrow guiding you allong (look on the floors and ceilings), a little marker indiciating where your objective is, or the path is linear. Sad.
Difficulty-wise, Halo has four options. DOOM has four main options, plus an ultra-hard Nightmare! option that resurrects enemies after being killed for a certain time, and makes them much much faster. Obviously, something like that would be too difficult for the average Halo player, so they omitted a similar difficulty in Halo.
Health-wise, DOOM uses the tried and true Health and Armor percentage system. When health reaches zero, you're dead, and armor helps offset damage. Halo, however, uses a very intriguing health system. It has sheilds, which get depleted first, and can get recharged after a specific period of time. Then, the health gets depleted if you are low on shields and you get hit. Which bascially means you can wait your way through a whole level by simply waiting around a corner for your shield to recharge after every engagement. Pitiful.
Numerically, that is, Halo seems to have an slight advantage in the weapons departmen. DOOM features a pistol, a shotgun, a chaingun, a rocket launcher, a plasma rifle, a chainsawm, a double barroled shotgun and the BFG 9000, in addition to your brass knuckles. Plus, you can pick up a Beserker that makes your punches powerful.
Halo features a pistol, a shotugn, an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, an alien plasma rifle....Do I sound like a broken record yet?...a sniper rifle, an alien charge gun, and a 'needler'. The only remotely interesting weapon is the Needler, which homes in on your enemy and delivers a charged explosion when tehy all collide. Neat. Except ths shot is pink. What kind of gun fires PINK? Oh, and did I mention the fact that you start out with the equivilent of a beserker pack in Halo, and have it for the rest of the game. Damn, they make some really pussified changes to FPS's sicne DOOM.
Enemy-wise, Halo features eight unique enemies. Note that I said unique, as there are tons of recolorations. DOOM features 10 enemies, and DOOM ][ features 9 more than that. Halo has no uniquly 'hard' enemies, while DOOM features the Barons at the end of Episode 1 and various other places, the Cyberdeamon at the end of Episode 2 and in the secret level of Episode 3, the Spiderdeamon at the end of Episode 3.
Now here is an intersting twist. At the end of DOOM ][, you meet an enemy unofficially called a Blasphament, which you have to shoot rockets into its brain in order to kill it, while constantly being assaulted by demons that appear out of thin air from the Blasphament. At the end of Halo, you have to destroy the main reactor by....throwing grenades...into it's exaust pipes... while under assault by the two alien forces...that appear out of thin air...
RIPOFF!!!!!!11111
Being good at Halo means you have to be good at aiming in two dimensions, being able to move the gun x pixels across and y pixels up and down. DOOM autoaims on the y axis, which proves to be a major advantage. Because less emphasis is placed on aiming, and more on dodging and strategy. If someone of DOOM-style strategy could merge seamlessly into Halo, they would own everyone on the playing field. As it stands, Halo is more 'aim at me and pull the trigger before I do the same'. Granted, this is something that is wrong with just about every modern FPS, but I'm doing a direct comparison between two games, so I feel like such a thing should be included.
The levels in both games have high points. But I swear if I ever see a map like the Library again, I will shoot someone. The outside parts of Halo look pretty nice, but the interior parts were so obviously prefabricated that it's not even funny. Honestly, sometimes I couldn't tell where the hell I was. Good thing in DOOM there is an Automap for similar, though less severe, situations.
DOOM is devoid of any real story. Hell has broken loose on a base, you clean it up. Halo has a somewhat well executed story, but it's not interesting enough to warrent a second playthrough on a higher difficulty, which I think was sort of the 'replay value'.
Otherwise. DOOM and Halo are nearly the same. Blow through a ton of enemies to reach the end of the map. So why is Halo coming out in 2001 when the same thing was avalable from a 1994-era game?
Winner: DOOM
Graphics
--------
Here is my major gripe with Halo, the graphics. Sure it has reflective surfaces. Sure, it is a true three-dimensional environment. Sure the enemies are models instead of sprites. But just take a tour through an alien spaceship, and you will see why I think that the graphics are pussified. I've never seen so many shades of pink, cyan, blue, and bright and happy colors like that. In stark contrast, the palette of DOOM has lots of brown, green, red, and grey with a few other lighter colors mixed in. I never feel like I'm in a candy store when I play DOOM. The graphics of DOOM convey an ultimate nitty-gritty feel, and especially the 'less-is-more' architectual beauty that is DOOM E1 is simply astounding, though architectually complex maps are no less favorable, like MAP14 of DOOM ][.
Sure Halo's graphics draw a lot of 'ohh''s and 'ahh''s. But those same people get zapped to death by the sissy little needlers that the aliens use, because they were looking around too much instead of concentrating on their kill. Plus, Halo runs in one resolution, while DOOM source ports support much much higher. Sure, the PC port will have these high resolutions too, but why buy a high-end system for a game like this when you could play high resolution on the system you have?
Winner: DOOM
Sound
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DOOM's sounds are quite impressive, especially the hypnotic BLAM and reloading of the Super Shotgun. The Plasma Rifle sounds hellish, the Rocket Launcher sounds like something is being unloaded from it - fast, and the Chaingun is quite pleasing to the ear. And just the sound of the BFG will tell you to get the fuck out of the way before it eveen fires. Don't even mention the genius that is the chainsaw, you can even hear it rev up before a level if you exit the level with one in hand. In comparison, Halo weapons lack punch, and just sound like you're staplegunning or nailgunning the poor suckers to death. Monster noises in DOOM will scare the shit out of you, especially the 'thump...thump....thump....' of the Cyberdeamon. One only needs to listen to the flood in Halo to find the monster sounds underwhelming. And someone please shut that AI construsct up, she sounds so scripted, the game would have been better off without her.
Music in DOOM is made by the legendary Bobby Prince. Enough said. It gets stuck in your head. Listen to a full metal fan-made (yep, he has *very* dedicated fans) MP3 of E1M8's theme, and you won't ever want to hear anything by Metalica again. Halo's composer did a decent job, but overall, the only song that ever planted itself in my head is the theme song. And all it is is simply a georgian chant or something.
Winner: DOOM
Multiplayer
-----------
Halo supports 2 player split-screen co-operative. DOOM supports 4 player co-operative, where each person has their own screen. Halo supports 16 player Deathmatch using four Xbox's and with each person having their own spacious 1/4 of the screen. Boo. DOOM natively allows 4 player Deathmatch, but source ports such as ZDaemon allow up to 16 players on a single game. Team play will soon be implimented in Zdaemon, but Team Play is just an excuse to have you and your partner gang up on the weakest member of the opposing team and frag them for cheap frags anyway. Losers. DOOM does not support Capture the Flag very well, but if you want to play Capture the Flag, Quake CTF is better than Halo any day of the week, plus it supports more than 16 players. Or hell, whats preventing you from playing real life paintball, where you can communicate effortlessly through your voice, something that is vital in CTF. And who really played any of the other modes in Halo anyway?
Halo has one Deathmatch Level. Booooring. What? There are more? Then play soemthing other than Blood fucking Gulch for christsakes. Vehicles does not equal good map. DOOM has three DM levels. What? There are more? Then play something other than DOOM2.WAD MAP01 and MAP07, and DWANGO5.WAD MAP01 for christsakes. Easy BFG does not equal good map, but at least it racks up omre frags than you ever get with a vehicle. Seriously. How many frags have you ever gotten with a vehicle in Deathmatch? How many times were you killed on it not knowing where the fuck your enemy was sniping from? What? It's impractical to run across the entire map? Don't you get it that the entire map is impractical for DM?
Winner: DOOM
Misc.
-----
DOOM has been ported to almost every popular 16, 32 and 64 bit console in existance, including the Playstation, Saturn, Super Nintendo, Sega 32X, Panisonic 3DO, Atari Jaguar, Nintendo 64, and more recently Game Boy Advance. In addition, it's been ported to numerous computers and operating systems of various arcitectures. It can even run on some digital cameras and handheld devices. In stark contrast, Halo only runs on the Xbox, and the promised PC port is still in development.
DOOM is still going strong, even 9 years after its origional release. Halo has yet to prove itself, and it's begining to show up in bargin bins by the dozen. DOOM's source code has been released. Halo's source code will never be relesed. (With Microsoft anywhere in the equation, Solitare's source will be released before Halo's ever will be)
DOOM has had an extensive longitivity time due to the fact that was partially open arcitecture from the start, and now fully open arcitecture, something that Bill Gates cries himself to sleep dreaming about. It has ensured a following, and in additian many huge undertakings were done with it. One of the most prominent examples is Aliens TC, which is still reguarded as one of the best...if not one of the scariest...total conversions of DOOM. It will give you the shakes when you're playing, and nightmares when you aren't. Halo might have a few map editors and the like when it comes out for PC, but large scale projects on Halo will be next to none, either due to restrictions or complexity. Or the fact that it's not worth it for a game like Halo. And it's not scary. How can I be scared when I'm being NEEDLED to death? More like hilarious.
Winner: DOOM
CONCLUSION
----------
Most games are classics or 'best games' for a reason. They pioneer something. Wolfenstein pioneered single player 3D gaming. DOOM pioneered Deathmatch and made editing simple due to it's open WAD format, plus it redefined the single player game to be fun. Quake pioneered true 3D engines and large team-based games with a seemingly simple addition of the limited pants color. Half-life pioneered the immervie story-driven single player game, as well as the easily accessable class-based and Counterstrike-based gameplay (Quake was first in the former field, but it was too complicated for the average player). Unreal Tournament pioneered Assault-type gameply (and did a damn good refinement of all the other game types) and Unreal Tournament 2003 pioneered the intruguing ball game. The lack of pioneering,
gamepaly-wise will be the reason why Quake 2, Quake 3, Sin, Dakantika and eventually Halo, will be forgotten. About the only thing Halo pioneered was Realistic Vehicles in a FPS (How is that for a niche? And by the way, Half Life was first with Vehicles period.), and they are not an intergal or practical enough part of the gamepaly to warrent continuous use. Come on, about the only cool one was the tank, and it showed up ONCE in single player. In the end, Halo brings nothing new to the table, and if you read through the rest of the document, actually down-grades the difficulty in some places in the name of 'strategy'. Bullshit. You want strategy, go play checkers.
Conclusion: DOOM is still the king of FPS's, hands down.
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There are huge debates surrounding Halo. Some say it's the best game ever made for any system. Some say it's the most revolutionary FPS game ever. In this article however, we are going to see how Halo stands up before the old grandaddy of the title 'most revolutionary FPS game ever'.
Which game? DOOM. This has been also given similar titles, and it has been released many many years before. So how does Halo stack up against it? Let's find out.
Gameplay
--------
They are similar games, gameplay-wise. Get from point A to point B while killing all monsters in the middle. DOOM's keycard puzzles and switch pulls are really no different than Halo's 'puzzles', except Halo guides you with the AI construct. Which you would have to be really stupid to use, since evereything either has an arrow guiding you allong (look on the floors and ceilings), a little marker indiciating where your objective is, or the path is linear. Sad.
Difficulty-wise, Halo has four options. DOOM has four main options, plus an ultra-hard Nightmare! option that resurrects enemies after being killed for a certain time, and makes them much much faster. Obviously, something like that would be too difficult for the average Halo player, so they omitted a similar difficulty in Halo.
Health-wise, DOOM uses the tried and true Health and Armor percentage system. When health reaches zero, you're dead, and armor helps offset damage. Halo, however, uses a very intriguing health system. It has sheilds, which get depleted first, and can get recharged after a specific period of time. Then, the health gets depleted if you are low on shields and you get hit. Which bascially means you can wait your way through a whole level by simply waiting around a corner for your shield to recharge after every engagement. Pitiful.
Numerically, that is, Halo seems to have an slight advantage in the weapons departmen. DOOM features a pistol, a shotgun, a chaingun, a rocket launcher, a plasma rifle, a chainsawm, a double barroled shotgun and the BFG 9000, in addition to your brass knuckles. Plus, you can pick up a Beserker that makes your punches powerful.
Halo features a pistol, a shotugn, an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, an alien plasma rifle....Do I sound like a broken record yet?...a sniper rifle, an alien charge gun, and a 'needler'. The only remotely interesting weapon is the Needler, which homes in on your enemy and delivers a charged explosion when tehy all collide. Neat. Except ths shot is pink. What kind of gun fires PINK? Oh, and did I mention the fact that you start out with the equivilent of a beserker pack in Halo, and have it for the rest of the game. Damn, they make some really pussified changes to FPS's sicne DOOM.
Enemy-wise, Halo features eight unique enemies. Note that I said unique, as there are tons of recolorations. DOOM features 10 enemies, and DOOM ][ features 9 more than that. Halo has no uniquly 'hard' enemies, while DOOM features the Barons at the end of Episode 1 and various other places, the Cyberdeamon at the end of Episode 2 and in the secret level of Episode 3, the Spiderdeamon at the end of Episode 3.
Now here is an intersting twist. At the end of DOOM ][, you meet an enemy unofficially called a Blasphament, which you have to shoot rockets into its brain in order to kill it, while constantly being assaulted by demons that appear out of thin air from the Blasphament. At the end of Halo, you have to destroy the main reactor by....throwing grenades...into it's exaust pipes... while under assault by the two alien forces...that appear out of thin air...
RIPOFF!!!!!!11111
Being good at Halo means you have to be good at aiming in two dimensions, being able to move the gun x pixels across and y pixels up and down. DOOM autoaims on the y axis, which proves to be a major advantage. Because less emphasis is placed on aiming, and more on dodging and strategy. If someone of DOOM-style strategy could merge seamlessly into Halo, they would own everyone on the playing field. As it stands, Halo is more 'aim at me and pull the trigger before I do the same'. Granted, this is something that is wrong with just about every modern FPS, but I'm doing a direct comparison between two games, so I feel like such a thing should be included.
The levels in both games have high points. But I swear if I ever see a map like the Library again, I will shoot someone. The outside parts of Halo look pretty nice, but the interior parts were so obviously prefabricated that it's not even funny. Honestly, sometimes I couldn't tell where the hell I was. Good thing in DOOM there is an Automap for similar, though less severe, situations.
DOOM is devoid of any real story. Hell has broken loose on a base, you clean it up. Halo has a somewhat well executed story, but it's not interesting enough to warrent a second playthrough on a higher difficulty, which I think was sort of the 'replay value'.
Otherwise. DOOM and Halo are nearly the same. Blow through a ton of enemies to reach the end of the map. So why is Halo coming out in 2001 when the same thing was avalable from a 1994-era game?
Winner: DOOM
Graphics
--------
Here is my major gripe with Halo, the graphics. Sure it has reflective surfaces. Sure, it is a true three-dimensional environment. Sure the enemies are models instead of sprites. But just take a tour through an alien spaceship, and you will see why I think that the graphics are pussified. I've never seen so many shades of pink, cyan, blue, and bright and happy colors like that. In stark contrast, the palette of DOOM has lots of brown, green, red, and grey with a few other lighter colors mixed in. I never feel like I'm in a candy store when I play DOOM. The graphics of DOOM convey an ultimate nitty-gritty feel, and especially the 'less-is-more' architectual beauty that is DOOM E1 is simply astounding, though architectually complex maps are no less favorable, like MAP14 of DOOM ][.
Sure Halo's graphics draw a lot of 'ohh''s and 'ahh''s. But those same people get zapped to death by the sissy little needlers that the aliens use, because they were looking around too much instead of concentrating on their kill. Plus, Halo runs in one resolution, while DOOM source ports support much much higher. Sure, the PC port will have these high resolutions too, but why buy a high-end system for a game like this when you could play high resolution on the system you have?
Winner: DOOM
Sound
-----
DOOM's sounds are quite impressive, especially the hypnotic BLAM and reloading of the Super Shotgun. The Plasma Rifle sounds hellish, the Rocket Launcher sounds like something is being unloaded from it - fast, and the Chaingun is quite pleasing to the ear. And just the sound of the BFG will tell you to get the fuck out of the way before it eveen fires. Don't even mention the genius that is the chainsaw, you can even hear it rev up before a level if you exit the level with one in hand. In comparison, Halo weapons lack punch, and just sound like you're staplegunning or nailgunning the poor suckers to death. Monster noises in DOOM will scare the shit out of you, especially the 'thump...thump....thump....' of the Cyberdeamon. One only needs to listen to the flood in Halo to find the monster sounds underwhelming. And someone please shut that AI construsct up, she sounds so scripted, the game would have been better off without her.
Music in DOOM is made by the legendary Bobby Prince. Enough said. It gets stuck in your head. Listen to a full metal fan-made (yep, he has *very* dedicated fans) MP3 of E1M8's theme, and you won't ever want to hear anything by Metalica again. Halo's composer did a decent job, but overall, the only song that ever planted itself in my head is the theme song. And all it is is simply a georgian chant or something.
Winner: DOOM
Multiplayer
-----------
Halo supports 2 player split-screen co-operative. DOOM supports 4 player co-operative, where each person has their own screen. Halo supports 16 player Deathmatch using four Xbox's and with each person having their own spacious 1/4 of the screen. Boo. DOOM natively allows 4 player Deathmatch, but source ports such as ZDaemon allow up to 16 players on a single game. Team play will soon be implimented in Zdaemon, but Team Play is just an excuse to have you and your partner gang up on the weakest member of the opposing team and frag them for cheap frags anyway. Losers. DOOM does not support Capture the Flag very well, but if you want to play Capture the Flag, Quake CTF is better than Halo any day of the week, plus it supports more than 16 players. Or hell, whats preventing you from playing real life paintball, where you can communicate effortlessly through your voice, something that is vital in CTF. And who really played any of the other modes in Halo anyway?
Halo has one Deathmatch Level. Booooring. What? There are more? Then play soemthing other than Blood fucking Gulch for christsakes. Vehicles does not equal good map. DOOM has three DM levels. What? There are more? Then play something other than DOOM2.WAD MAP01 and MAP07, and DWANGO5.WAD MAP01 for christsakes. Easy BFG does not equal good map, but at least it racks up omre frags than you ever get with a vehicle. Seriously. How many frags have you ever gotten with a vehicle in Deathmatch? How many times were you killed on it not knowing where the fuck your enemy was sniping from? What? It's impractical to run across the entire map? Don't you get it that the entire map is impractical for DM?
Winner: DOOM
Misc.
-----
DOOM has been ported to almost every popular 16, 32 and 64 bit console in existance, including the Playstation, Saturn, Super Nintendo, Sega 32X, Panisonic 3DO, Atari Jaguar, Nintendo 64, and more recently Game Boy Advance. In addition, it's been ported to numerous computers and operating systems of various arcitectures. It can even run on some digital cameras and handheld devices. In stark contrast, Halo only runs on the Xbox, and the promised PC port is still in development.
DOOM is still going strong, even 9 years after its origional release. Halo has yet to prove itself, and it's begining to show up in bargin bins by the dozen. DOOM's source code has been released. Halo's source code will never be relesed. (With Microsoft anywhere in the equation, Solitare's source will be released before Halo's ever will be)
DOOM has had an extensive longitivity time due to the fact that was partially open arcitecture from the start, and now fully open arcitecture, something that Bill Gates cries himself to sleep dreaming about. It has ensured a following, and in additian many huge undertakings were done with it. One of the most prominent examples is Aliens TC, which is still reguarded as one of the best...if not one of the scariest...total conversions of DOOM. It will give you the shakes when you're playing, and nightmares when you aren't. Halo might have a few map editors and the like when it comes out for PC, but large scale projects on Halo will be next to none, either due to restrictions or complexity. Or the fact that it's not worth it for a game like Halo. And it's not scary. How can I be scared when I'm being NEEDLED to death? More like hilarious.
Winner: DOOM
CONCLUSION
----------
Most games are classics or 'best games' for a reason. They pioneer something. Wolfenstein pioneered single player 3D gaming. DOOM pioneered Deathmatch and made editing simple due to it's open WAD format, plus it redefined the single player game to be fun. Quake pioneered true 3D engines and large team-based games with a seemingly simple addition of the limited pants color. Half-life pioneered the immervie story-driven single player game, as well as the easily accessable class-based and Counterstrike-based gameplay (Quake was first in the former field, but it was too complicated for the average player). Unreal Tournament pioneered Assault-type gameply (and did a damn good refinement of all the other game types) and Unreal Tournament 2003 pioneered the intruguing ball game. The lack of pioneering,
gamepaly-wise will be the reason why Quake 2, Quake 3, Sin, Dakantika and eventually Halo, will be forgotten. About the only thing Halo pioneered was Realistic Vehicles in a FPS (How is that for a niche? And by the way, Half Life was first with Vehicles period.), and they are not an intergal or practical enough part of the gamepaly to warrent continuous use. Come on, about the only cool one was the tank, and it showed up ONCE in single player. In the end, Halo brings nothing new to the table, and if you read through the rest of the document, actually down-grades the difficulty in some places in the name of 'strategy'. Bullshit. You want strategy, go play checkers.
Conclusion: DOOM is still the king of FPS's, hands down.
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