Word: doomful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...original Doom told a rather disposable story about a space Marine posted to some kind of high-powered research facility on Mars. An experiment goes wrong, yada yada yada, and a portal to hell opens, flooding the station with demons, which the player must dispatch with an assortment of high-caliber weapons. Doom 3 tells the same story but this time treats it with surprisingly artistic tenderness. Carmack's light engine allows the game's designers to paint the story the way a film director would, with light and shadow, like a noir mystery. Scenes are lit by broken light...
...virtual worlds go, Doom 3 is big. To play through it just once, never mind multiplayer matches and replay time, takes upwards of 30 hours. (Take that, Peter Jackson!) Despite its size, it is meticulously detailed. The monsters of the original Doom were barely animated blobs of pixels; this time the game is populated by a gallery of fascinating grotesques and gargoyles created by Kenneth Scott, id's soft-spoken lead artist, whose work references Francis Bacon and cheesy fantasy artist Frank Frazetta with equal reverence. The ghouls are excruciatingly detailed. As you're being devoured by a swarm...
...Doom 3 is sure to be big business. It had better be: id Software releases only one product every few years, and developing a game like Doom 3 costs from $15 million to $20 million. Unless it confounds all expectations, Doom 3 should sell well into the millions, at $54.99 a pop. And id will license Carmack's technology to a swarm of game developers. Although conventional wisdom has it that games like id's appeal to just a narrow, nerdy hard-core subculture, they're actually wildly popular. Even before Doom 3 hits stores...
...video games go, Myst is like the weird, arty kid in a family of jocks. Launched in 1993, the same year as Doom, the original Myst involved clicking through a fantasy world and solving puzzles in order to unravel a conflict between a father and his two sons. It became one of the best-selling computer games of all time. And its nonviolent story line helped make it one of the first to attract many female players: about 30% were women, says Ubisoft, vs. 10% for most games...
...will breathtaking scenery and an ongoing family saga sell to today's twitch-happy gamers? Genevieve Lord, producer of Myst IV, thinks gamers will like the change of pace. "In libraries and video stores, you have variety, so why not in video games?" she asks. Whereas Doom is like an action movie, Myst is more of a drama. The appeal is subtler, but that doesn't mean it should be doomed. --By Anita Hamilton