This piece was sparked by a reply to this thread which I felt would do better in an column. Also I've not written a column for a while now so I thought now's about a good a time as any.

Can you guess what it is yet? Yes that's right! What else do you think this column could be about? None other than DooM3. Now before you read this and say that I'm biased or something, I'd better tell you my personal views on this new game.

My Personal Views.

Mmmkay, what do I think about the singleplayer part of the game in short? I think it friggin rocks! Now I know some people either aren't that bothered about the Singleplayer aspect of the game and were only waiting for the Multiplayer or that some people were just genuinly dissapointed or unimpressed with the Singleplayer, but as for me... I played through it and really enjoyed it. I've not had a chance to play the game in Multiplayer with other people yet. I've run around a few of the maps on my own and found that the movement is new and seems just as dynamic as quake3 is (if not more so).

Ok now the next part is still tied into my personal oppinion so I'm not going to make a new heading, actually I'll just continue with the heading I have now and won't bother creating a new heading at all.

Soo, what was my reply about for the people that are lazy enough not to bother to click on the link and aren't lazy enough to actually be reading this long winded piece of... uh... creative brilliance well as you may have already guessed it's about DooM3. duh!

Enough with the crazy unfunny humour attempts from me, down to the cold hard facts (which are actually all based on my oppinion).

People say they aren't satisfied with the multiplayer in this brand new game. Some say it's too slow, some say it's unbalanced while others say it's nothing like Quake 3 Arena. GOD DAMN! Guess what. This is not quake 3 and it wasn't designed to be a multiplayer game in the first place! But how nice of id to have left some dynamic elements in this game, such as strafe jumping and rocket jumping while at the same time adding new dynamics to it like ramp jumps and.. well I can't think of a second dynamic just yet, BUT THAT IS BESIDE THE POINT! And thank you the id software people for making strafe jumping a bit different from quake 3, it's nice to have something new to learn or even something just a bit different. It's similar but it's not the same, and that in my personal oppinion is a good thing. Complaining that you can't strafe jump as good in this new game as you can in quake 3 seems just a tad bit silly to me. Have you spent the same amount of time practicing jumping in this new game as you have practicing quake3 jumping? I don't think I really need to answer that for you. Oh oh! The second new dynamic in the game could be the rampjump+rocketjump combo!

Ok about the balances, I personally can't really comment as I've not had a chance to play this multiplayer properly yet, so what I say next may change after I play a few games and get owned by a chaingun+berserk combination over and over again. But until then I shall hold the following view: Lets have a look at quake1, it has some seriously powerful weapons (rocket launcher, lightning gun, hell lets put the grenade launcher in here too!) which make it unbalanced! But people learnt to live with it and made ways to counter aim heavy players until those aim heavy players learnt how to think... then the players that could think but couldn't aim were pretty much b0rked. So spam was born! This has stayed with us in just about every fps game since. Crazy people out thinking eachother and controlling parts of the maps well created a whole new world where........ ok I think I've lost my way and will stop typing that trail of thought before I get too sidetracked.

Did you know you can blow up rockets with bullets in DooM3!? Well some people are suggesting removing that, I don't actually see why. It's part of a new game, and it's a new thing to learn how to do. Why remove it? I don't know.. anyway trying to turn a game into something it's not is something that shouldn't really be done. Because if you change that, it's no longer the game that it originally was. I'm all for mods and different things being created through mods. I'm also all for mods that enhance the original game such as competition mods like osp. Damn I thought I'd stopped with trying to be funny ;o|.

Well on a more serious note ...this is all pretty serious anyway but, anyway... this game has a lot of potential. This potential has to be nurtured with a competition mod, just like osp nurtured quake3 into something that it has become today. Do you people seriously think that quake3 would be where it is now, a very well respected game with such a high level of competition without osp? Where would quake1 be right now if there was no quakeworld clients? They'd both actually be dead in the ground a long time ago just like people have been prophesying for years. DooM3 needs this from the community, it needs support and love ;). Changing the physics in the game would result in it no longer being vanilla doom3 but a half promode hybrid and lots of mushy pees, personally I would rather have vanilla(osp type) doom3 and promode doom3 seperate. Improve the netcode, add some brightskins if you _really_ want, change some visuals, but please... please don't change the physics and call it vanilla doom3 :).

On another note, I'd like to say that the shadows that can be turned off don't effect the dark places around the map. So it's not that biga deal. Maybe it's actually advantageous to have shadows on in multiplayer, but some people's pc's can't hack it. I don't know... I guess I'll write some more on the multiplayer once I've actually played it for a few weeks.

Wendy lay the lard on me please.