How not scary is Doom 4?

  • Thread starter Sciborg_S_Patel
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Sciborg_S_Patel


Is it just me or is the old game much more freaky even with less impressive graphics? I recall playing for hours and suddenly it all seemed a bit too real...this just looks like fancy but hollow CGI?

Old game:

 
I think Doom was the first shareware game that I spent money to register.

Now to go in a completely different direction - have you read anything by Col. Grossman?

I spent almost a quarter of a century as an Army infantry officer, a paratrooper, a Ranger, and a West Point Psychology Professor, learning and studying how we enable people to kill. Most soldiers have to be trained to kill.

Healthy members of most species have a powerful, natural resistance to killing their own kind. Animals with antlers and horns fight one another by butting heads. Against other species they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranha turn their fangs on everything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes bite anything, but they wrestle one another.

When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear our thought processes become very primitive, and we slam head on into that hardwired resistance against killing. During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier (Marshall, 1978). You can observe this in killing throughout history, as I have outlined in much greater detail in my book, On Killing, (Grossman, 1996), in my three peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries, (Grossman, 1999a, 1999b, and Murray, 1999) and in my entry in the Oxford Companion to American Military History (1999).

That's the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are willing and able to kill. When the military became aware of this, they systematically went about the process of “fixing” this “problem.” And fix it they did. By Vietnam the firing rate rose to over 90 percent (Grossman, 1999a).
http://www.killology.com/art_teach_killing.htm

There has been significant desensitization towards violence in west via mass media including videogames.

http://www.killology.com/article_teachkid.htm
 
Doom, for me, was one of the best action games I played in my youth. It was quite an adventure and one I recall fondly lol

I agree, though, Sci.. the new one is more action-packed slaughterfest than it is scary. Maybe it's hard to get a really scary game that is fast-paced but I don't know. But, I don't think I'll be buying this new Doom.
 

Is it just me or is the old game much more freaky even with less impressive graphics? I recall playing for hours and suddenly it all seemed a bit too real...this just looks like fancy but hollow CGI?
Agreed. This one looks gorier than ever but not that scary. It's just guts and blood all over the place... :D I'll pass.
(I liked more the pixelated and less copious blood sprays of the first two Dooms)
These days I prefer something a little more "relaxed" like Fallout 4... even though it's a huge timesucker.
 
The old DOOMs (the first and second ones) were the scariest games I ever played. Not a single horror game of nowadays was as emotionally heavy as this two old shooters.

The primary reason for that mental pressure is the sense of TOTAL LONELINESS. In nearly any modern horror, the protagonist regularly meet other characters. Now matter how terrible the setting it, you ocassionally contact other people, not just monsters. In old DOOMs, you are absolutely alone. Even rare textual intermissions reinforce this loneliness, remindind you that no one but you (and hordes of infernal abominations) is left here.

And the world itself is completely dead and unnatural. Nothing resembling the living reality, even one that is being twisted and distorted by some outworldly force. It is dead from the start, a mechanical labyrinth with no meaning or value in it - an artificial lethal trap with construction-modifying triggers (levers, buttons etc.) and creatures that stand on their places, making nothing but repeated mechanical movements, until you arrive and they are activated to kill.

All of above, in fact, appear to be much closer to the negative, distressing and "hellish" STEs/NDEs than anything else. The description of his own "hellish" spiritual experience, made by John C. Lilly, fits the above statements neatly: the world is percieved as totally meaningless, value-less mechanism, totally hostile to you and crushing you - blindly and indifferently; with all creatures, including yourself, being adversaries to each other - not by their will, but being determined by the cosmic inhuman mechanism. A world in which anti-theists' and physicalists' notion of soulless mechanical universe suddenly become true - not as a mere intellectual pronouncement, but as a lived experiece.
 
It's the Dead Space 3 syndrome. Although, I must admit that most of these "modern" games can hardly conjure jump scares in me, the worst ones may get one or two at most. For example, I absolutely loved TLOU, but found it completely unthreatening despite being warned about the "stress" beforehand.
 
The Last of Us was a big let down...

While I enjoyed the story it was very slow to get to the end of it and encounter the game as they wanted me to experience it.

I played it on the hardest difficulty at first (as I do with most games) and found my ammo supply just fine. The ability to sneak in that was ridiculously easy. But, the storyline itself, and especially the end (not spoiling it) made it worth playing. I cannot wait for the the sequel and maybe more?

http://www.movienewsguide.com/the-last-of-us-sequel-in-the-works/197284

But who knows when that will be... :(
 
I could have done without the University (don't really care for zoo animals in Zombieland either, it seemed *way* out of place in this setting) or any of the late infested-only sections. They worked well early on to establish how the world has fallen apart (walking trough an abandoned neighborhood early in the game gets the point across wonderfully) but later, after you find out that survivors are the real threat in this world, they seem distracting. But, by far the best thing, and what made me love the dynamic of the characters was the story and the ambiance, the combat system was good but not revolutionary. Also, they don't really limit your weapons, but they do limit shivs, which basically forces the player into choosing between completitionism or a more appropiate weapon to deal with one of the most annoying enemy classes in the game. If you choose to save them, then you need to employ strategies to avoid getting one-hit killed, which does up the ante.
 
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