May 20, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:02
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| Okay, so Doom 2016 has been released, so roll out your caffeinated IV drip, grab your eye drops, and get ready to not go to the bathroom or even blink until the sun rises tomorrow morning, at which point your eyes will be so bloodshot you'll think you're still on Mars anyway. | |
| Now, over the past decade or two, there's been a somewhat dispiriting theme developing in first-person shooters, which is the attempt to build some sort of plot around the mindless, kaleidoscopic pixel mayhem that originated the genre. | |
| Characters have been given backstories, family relationships, neuroses, sex drives, romances, and, God help us, some sort of conscience. | |
| Now, mostly due to technological restrictions, this is not how I was introduced to the genre back in the 80s and 90s. | |
| The original Wolfenstein 3D had all the graphical complexity of Minecraft played on a calculator. | |
| Your entire plot revolved around trying to escape a garishly lit Lego pixel dungeon where all the dead bodies unnervingly rotated around you as you roamed around. | |
| Ah... | |
| I still recall the Y-axis excitement of the original Doom series where you could actually shoot things above or below you. | |
| Although you could not actually look up or down. | |
| That had to wait for the Quake series. | |
| I did play a few more of the Doom series. | |
| I'm actually fairly glad I didn't have wearable technology during Doom 3. | |
| Since my heart rate monitor would have likely exploded on my wrist as I crept around the bowels of the Martian facility, Gollum style, armed only with a flashlight, eye strain, and the battery taste of cortisol in my teeth. | |
| Now, largely as a result of becoming a parent, I have somewhat fallen away from the computer game genre. | |
| But, to be honest, I did catch more than an echo of long-ago bachelor time-sync excitement when I saw a new Doom version was about to drop. | |
| Because I do a fair amount of video production, I have a fairly meaty video card which allows me to max out most settings, which is weirdly emotionally satisfying. | |
| You know, compromising on video quality seems like selling your soul to a devil who can't seem to quite stifle a yawn as you do so. | |
| In preparation for the release, I decided not to watch any intro videos or read any reviews before playing. | |
| Now I've put a couple of hours into it, and I find the landscape, the monsters, the weapons, and the feverish fireworks sprint around combat really compelling. | |
| I actually got a good dose of what I was in store for when I first booted up the game and didn't even receive an introductory background video of who I was, where I was, and why I was going to spend about a dozen hours disassembling pretty much everything that moved. | |
| First impressions, id Software has developed a darkly beautiful game engine which performs spectacularly well. | |
| It's been forever and a day since I stopped to admire the scenery in a video game. | |
| Ah, I vividly remember the lovely waterfall at the beginning of Unreal. | |
| But I stopped quite often in Doom 2016 to just absorb the surroundings, smell the hellflowers, if you like. | |
| It is a kind of a cliche of the hangers and crates games that all warning lights must be spinning against deeply complex pipes and cogs so that the lighting and shading engine can dizzily sing its own praises. | |
| I've never seen such wonderful fog effects in a game before either. | |
| Standing in front of slowly rotating fans with soft beams of light piercing through a cloud of drifting mist like hazy lightsabers was visually truly beautiful. | |
| It was actually almost a relief to kill off the endlessly intrusive monsters so that I could get back to enjoying the scenery as something other than temporary shelter from arcing fireballs and floor-hugging lightning bolts. | |
| Now, a lot of first-person shooters have somewhat devolved into games of distance and patience. | |
| You know, you sit with a zoomed-in sniper rifle waiting for the inevitably curious enemy AI to peer around a fence or box in order to be picked off. | |
| Doom takes this elderly walker style of paralytic pseudo-combat and inverts it, using the feed pellet incentives of here's more health than ammunition to lure you into a hallmark from hell, hug-with-a-chainsaw mayhem of smell-the-demon-sweat close combat. | |
| You are encouraged, nay rewarded, to get up close and personal with the various Hellspawn, reaping rewards for various nose-to-nose combat maneuvers that generally involve disassembling the monsters, and then reassembling them, mostly inside-out with perhaps an arm or a leg where their head used to be. | |
| Now, while it is possible to admire the light, the fog... | |
| The administrative details of the landscape after the monsters have been eliminated, it's really not so easy to pause and admire the detail and fluidity and style of the various demons. | |
| If you've ever been raged at by a really hot woman, you kind of know the feeling. | |
| You can admire the form, but get sort of distracted by the anger. | |
| It's sort of like... | |
| Okay, imagine trying to absorb the beauty of an evil art gallery while being dragged through it at high speed in a sack after having been roofied. | |
| You get the idea. | |
| To be fair, the landscapes in Doom could use a little bit more variety, though. | |
| The outside Martian landscape is eerily beautiful, and I can almost taste the red sand working its way under my gumline, but the majority of at least the early part of the game takes place in the endless, boxy, high-tech warehouses so common to first-person shooters. | |
| Unlike the designers for Oblivion, who seem to have actually had to go outside from time to time, the id designers seem to have been locked deep in the ground, far from sunlight, surrounded by intricate metal boxes and buried under levers that never seem to work. | |
| Interaction with the environment in Doom 2016 is extremely limited. | |
| Yeah, you can kick the odd bottle or barrel mostly to the edge of a precipice just to see how far it will fall, of course. | |
| And shooting the walls creates, you know, sticker postage stamp on the pipe overlays along with perhaps a bit of steam. | |
| But in general, you can no more interact with the environment than you can step into an Escher picture. | |
| Some of the limited interactions possible in Half-Life have kind of fallen by the wayside, as has its political commentary and indeed any other living human beings at all. | |
| Because the only other people you encounter in the New Doom, other than some creepily half-zombified woman who walks like a human torso stuck on the ass end of a giraffe, are bodies. | |
| Ah yes, lots and lots of bodies. | |
| Now, this seems to be the only human installation on Mars, and since there seems to be no one else alive, why not take a page from the famous marine and aliens, take off, and nuke it from orbit? | |
| It's also hard, at least for me, to avoid thinking of this combination of Mars, science, and mysticism as a bloody chainsaw horror homage to Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. | |
| Now, in Doom 2016, the plodding monotony of enemy combat strategies in prior games has been almost completely avoided. | |
| Like in many first-person shooters, enemies come at you like slow-rolling marbles or quickly dismembered First World War trench soldiers. | |
| The enemies in Doom 2016 jump and twist and turn and leap to the point where it kind of feels like a blend of Martian warehouse and a fireball-based kung fu dojo. | |
| There is... | |
| Actually, even some gender neutrality in villainy. | |
| One demon in particular seems like a coked-up combination of a giant female wasp and a fleeting thought, albeit much more spectacularly armed. | |
| Now, a little bit of shameful confession time. | |
| I don't know if it's because I'm sort of out of practice or whatever, but I find that I get lost. | |
| Well, a little bit more often than I used to. | |
| I have good spatial reasoning I had no trouble picking my way through even lower intestine brain-twisting three-dimensional games like the original Descent series. | |
| I will also confess that hitting the tab and bringing up the 3D map in Doom, while it does allow me to twist and poke around the glowing outlines of my potential destinations, doesn't really actually help me figure out where to go very much. | |
| I'm also pretty not good at finding secrets, unless I'm completely lost. | |
| I stumble across something and go, hey, great job, spatial incoherence, we've found a secret. | |
| Now... | |
| Questions have arisen, and inevitably so. | |
| Dehumanizing violence. | |
| Okay, this game has some truly spectacular gore. | |
| There are chainsaws, the ripping out of hearts, and some fairly spectacular, hey, where did my intestines go, self-death sequences. | |
| And I'm fairly sure I beat a demon to death with its own leg. | |
| To be fair, though, it was not letting me lead in the cha-cha. | |
| However, despite my many hours of digital mayhem over the course of my life, I remain as committed to peace and gentleness as ever. | |
| It is mindless, lizard-brained, firework fun, and statistically actually seems to reduce crime as a whole, these games, either by bleeding off excess aggression or keeping aggressive people in their basement, laying waste to pixels rather than people. | |
| Now, Doom 2016, fairly expensive purchase to be sure, 70 bucks Canadian or so, for... | |
| A single-player campaign that you fast-twitch youngsters can probably complete in about a dozen hours. | |
| Me, I calculate things by movie blocks. | |
| Twelve hours is six movies, which in the theater would cost about 70 bucks anyway. | |
| And this is certainly more interactive and absorbing and pretty than the average generic sentimental programming that passes for mainstream movies these days. | |
| There is a reason why video games are a larger industry than movies. | |
| How many people, we'd re-watch movies these days. | |
| Many video games, the new Doom among them, not only allow for replayability at higher levels of difficulty, but multiplayer mayhem as well, which extends your entertainment dollar potentially almost to infinity. | |
| So, with regards to Doom 2016, I give this title a hearty recommendation. | |
| Two half-severed thumbs up. | |
| It is an old-school shooter with a virtual reality Khan Academy visual upgrade. | |
| It's good for the reflexes, good for the brain, bad for the wrists and mouths, but well worth the money. | |
| So thank you very much. | |
| This is a video game review from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Please like, subscribe, and share, and let me know if you like these game reviews, and I'll be very happy to do more. | |
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| Thank you, everyone, so much for watching. |
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