I’m having a good amount of fun these last two days with this Total Conversion done with the GZDoom engine. It’s in fact standalone, you don’t need the original doom to play, it has its own .exe. For now they have released only the first episode, which have 7 missions.
It’s a mix of Quake 3d polygonal world with 2d sprites for weapons and enemies like Doom, with the theme of WW2 from Wolfenstein. It also uses ‘realistic’ music and sound effects (taken from other games like Medal of Honor, I think, lol) which gives it an interesting feel, a mix of retro and modern fps.
It feels so nice to come back to a FPS which is a bit hard, you have to take care of your health, explore the level properly, and have a good amount of action. Weapons have a very nice feeling, despite their simplicity.
That said, it isn’t perfect, there are some drawbacks, some of them that come precisely because the ‘old school’ experience. Because it’s hard you are going to quicksave a good amount… but there is no quicksave key, nor checkpoints. The game lack a bit too much of guidance of what a button does (it opens something usually) so you have to explore the level maybe too much times, getting stuck sometimes. Aesthetically, the game is too grey, it’s installations and bunkers and things like that, and it’s all grey, grey grey.
I played the first two missions. It’s pretty good but I have a lot of single player malaise right now so I started looking up how many levels it had (7, I think) and decided I didn’t want to continue.
There are more new enemies than I believed at first, and they are well integrated in the Quake 1 repertoire. Some of them are designed for the ‘scifi’ theme, others for the ‘fantasy gothic’ theme, others for the Lovecraft theme.
Right now I’m in a map with 400 enemies! That’s a lot of Quake standards, I think the map has to be huge.
I forgot Quake had all that quality player made content. I should give some of it a try next time instead of automatically running to Steam to buy a new game.
I can’t recommend Arcane Dimensions enough. The modders removed all the hitscan weapons and enemies in favor of projectile-based combat, and coupled with the stunning level design it’s an absolute joy to play. I run with animation interpolation disabled and feels like the ultimate version of singleplayer Quake.
Oh, wait, so you want it to be the other way round! to strafe with the mouse and turn with the keyboard!
Goddamn you are weird! :D
It’s still easy to do. Enable lookstrafe (ON) in options, and in custom controls, rebind turn left and turn right to A and D, supposing you want to use WASD.
