Blessed by the Potato

What’s scarier than playing Doom 3 in the dark with the surround sound turned up? Playing Doom 3 in the dark with the surround sound turned up and having your cat jump on your lap out of nowhere.

Yep, so after depriving myself of a number of games until my thesis was done, I finally submitted my thesis. Someone at work immediately loaned me Doom 3, so I’ve been playing it for just over an hour now, and it is freaky. It’s surprisingly resource-intensive (I thought I’d be playing at close to max resolution with my Radeon 9800, instead I’m at 800×600 for a good frame rate, though I think it could chug through 1024×768). Some of the scares are classic haunted house stuff (like having a crane drop a bunch of steel beams beside you), and I’ve read a number of criticisms about that, but it’s still scary. It works.

The “no duct tape on Mars” phenomenon is really annoying, so after getting past a half-dozen imps, I got a mod that lets you use the flashlight with the shotgun and machine gun. It was just an annoying mechanism before where you had to choose between your flashlight and your gun, especially given how feeble the flashlight is (can’t space marines come up with something brighter than my sister’s fisher price flashlight?). Having monsters appear out of thin air to kill you is shocking, yes, but it’s also slightly annoying — I go to all the trouble of clearing out a corner and backing into it, just to have a zombie spawn behind me (and he didn’t bust through the wall either, since it’s still solid after I kill him). I know teleporting monsters becomes a big part of the plot later on in the game, but I really didn’t think it would start so soon.

Nothing I’m saying is new of course, since the game is nearly 2 years old. It is really scary though, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to continue playing it, I just don’t have the nerves anymore. I nearly shit myself when I was in the air ducts and the cat jumped on me…