Hacker CinemaOedipus's Beast of Doom
Oedipus's Beast of Doom
オイディプスの凶獣
1993 · Film · 81 min
Directed by Koichi Nakajima
Detective Tsumura Kyosuke embarks on a stimulant deal and shoots the son of Kudo, the head of a gangster group. Kudo, who killed his son, is angry and says, "I will show you hell..." and burns the flame of revenge. Tsumura, who is taken hostage by his wife Mihoko and son Daisuke, goes to a warehouse in the harbor to save them. Tsumura aims at Suki and shoots Kudo...
3 positive1 negative18 neutralfrom 22 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
24 comments on Hacker News
A lot of modern games have put a lot of time into their gameplay loop, and in part, this is why a lot of modern games feel like work. Focusing on this too much really can crowd out spontaneous fun. A gameplay loop also does not guarantee that a game is fun. Your loop might be: deploy --> shoot bad guys --> loot things --> come home --> process loot. None of this guarantees that the game is actually fun. Maybe the enemy design sucks, or the weapons feel bad, or the game just feels grindy.
In this way, it feels a lot like modern movies: in a lot of cases, cinematography seems to be some sort of objective science which has mostly just improved. And nowadays even a fairly bad movie will have great cinematography. It's just that the writing / plot / acting / etc. are quite poor.
That is, a proven gameplay loop can still fall flat quite badly. Easy examples would be all the modern hero shooters / looter shooters.
It's also worth noting that the definition of what constitutes a "gameplay loop" is pretty loosely defined. 1993 Doom clearly has a gameplay loop in the strict sense of the word: start level --> get weapons / ammo --> get keys --> kill monsters --> exit level. But this feels much less mechanical and gameified than your average modern game which almost certainly incorporate things such as RPG mechanics / stats / level-ups / FOMO events, etc. The latter feels much more artificial and forced, whereas Doom feels like "just playing a game."
Don't forget about Doom (1993) and Doom 2 (1994), 30 years old and still have a large community of users and mappers, even John Romero released episodes 5 and 6 for the original Doom. On the other hand I used to play some single player maps for Q1 some years ago, the site [quaddicted](https://www.quaddicted.com/) was wonderful
I'm not sure I agree, but I appreciate your response. I think the question is whether "left" always means progressive, and whether "right" always means conservative. For instance, I would not claim that the American right is very conservative these days, but they also don't feel "leftist" whatsoever. I don't want to really delve into political topics, however I feel strongly that what is currently going on with executive orders and gutting the executive branch workforce is not conservative whatsoever. It's more closely matches an unfamiliar kind of progressivism than it does conservatism in my mind. I could definitely understand how and why someone wouldn't agree with this, of course. I also think it could potentially be argued that leftist programs, such as entitlements, social programs, etc, are not necessarily "progressive." There could be ways these programs were strictly regressive. (and by that I mean "past-looking" rather than "bad.")
Now, I would also agree that terms like left, right, conservative, and progressive are not really strictly defined a lot of the time. With such loose definitions it might be hard to claim that I've got the definitions correct. In other words, they may just be no strict definition, and I think you could also argue that _I'm_ the one taking a minority definition.
Progressivism itself is an interesting topic in general. I think there is a lot of progressive thought which is strictly apolitical, but is definitionally progressive. An easy example would be video games. Is Doom 2 better than Doom 1 because it added more gameplay elements? Is Doom 2016 even better because it added so many more systems, and has more advanced graphics? In my opinion "apolitically progressive" gamers would almost always claim yes; things _advanced_ and having advanced the older media is inherently inferior. They would claim that the older Doom games are "janky" which is shorthand for "the older games have not adopted or anticipated modern conventions." Other folks take a different tact; they tend to dislike any newer advances in gaming, and get "stuck" preferring older games. Others take a more balanced approach; they appreciate both new and old games, but don't necessarily prefer something merely because it's newer.
I think movies are another interesting example. I think it could be argued that there are potentially objective improvements when it comes to movie making; cinematography would be one example. The movie Citizen Kane and the Director Alfred Hitchcock created totally novel approaches to cinematography which been widely and thoroughly adopted by filmmakers of all skill levels. (in other words, nearly everyone agrees that these are objective advancements) Even some of the worst movies nowadays may have more competent cinematography than some of the best movies from the 50s and 60s. On the other hand, there are clearly a lot of stylistic aspects to film-making which cannot really be said have to improved, but merely changed with the fashions of the times. I would argue that strongly-progressive-minded folks would not be able to see this; they'd see any older movie as inherently inferior, and see movies through a lens of progress. In other words, movies were always going to "advance" to where they are now, and anything older is inherently inferior. (and this is true even if they can still appreciate the movie.) Now, this is what I might call "hard apolitical progressivism," and is not necessarily the most common view out there. It's a useful example because of its explanatory nature.
It's easy to see how this mentality _could_ map to politics, but I guess my point is that it doesn't necessarily do so. And, even when it does map to politics it doesn't necessarily follow that people on the left are always progressive and people on the right are always conservative. (although I'll obviously admit that this trend is _usually_ true; the left tends to be more progressive on average, and the right tends to be more conservative on average.)
I think there's a couple of orthogonal issues here.
One of them is the nature of interactivity in the levels themselves. There's a spectrum between having a game grammar made of distinct discrete interactive reusable objects and then building unique situations by assembling them in interesting ways, versus having (essentially) unique scripted traps or interactive things or set pieces that only show up in one place. Older action games that inspired Doom tend to draw from that former tradition; a lot of FPS games that came after Quake tended to go more down that second road. Quake's trigger system specifically opened up the door to a rudimentary kind of visual scripting that made the latter style of design more possible in a way that wasn't possible in Doom (although it was possible in Hexen via HexenC(?)). I think you could say that that style of design really came more into its own with Half-Life, which foregrounded unique interactivity grounded in very specific, themed levels much more clearly. Doom at its best seems like it's much more in the design space of, say, Robotron and old Mario games. Fewer unique set pieces, much more focus on discrete interactive toys to be recombined... and given id's background with Commander Keen and their earlier recreation of the first level of Mario 3, this design influence shouldn't be a surprise. Anyway, Quake feels like it is at the intersection of these two styles of design.
I think it is true that Peterson did try to go more down that second road of design in the episode 4 maps in a way that there was less of in other maps, and that it interesting.
But the other thing that sticks out to me more so, in terms of level design, is about the way the space is shaped. A lot of the very best Doom and Quake levels have a tendency of having different parts of levels intersect and interact in interesting, playful ways. The order that you see areas is different from the order that you hear areas is different from the order that you can attack into or interact with areas is different from the order you can move through areas is different from the order that different kinds of enemies can move through areas or attack areas. And that changes as you progress through a level, get keys, and activate switches. There's a tendency for levels to start somewhat linear and movement constrained but give information about later areas in a somewhat more non-linear, tantalizing way, and then as a player progresses, for the player's movement in a level to become more like a multiply connected graph as switches, keys, and activated lifts make a lot of one-way paths become two-way. And that style of design plays to the strengths of Doom and Quake using BSPs for levels as their fundamental data structure - BSPs specifically make these kinds of weird and surprising visual and physical intersections between areas manageable in terms of computational performance on 90's era hardware.
Whether or not someone considers the design approaches I just outlined appealing is fundamentally an aesthetic issue, obviously - there's no one right way to enjoy a game. But my general sense is that the Sandy Peterson maps in Doom and Quake tend to explore these approaches to play much less than the maps made by other designers.
Vaguely similar:
ttyquake Quake I (2000) [0]
aaquake2 Quake II (2001) [1]
text mode Doom [2]
Someone even wrote an AA-lib app to convert from a TV capture card to text so they could watch TV over a tty. [3] I guess they had to encode the audio like it was 35 mm at movies then. ;)
0. https://games.slashdot.org/story/00/02/11/0336257/textmode-quake
1. https://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/
2. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Text_Mode_Doom
3. http://n00n.free.fr/aatv/
I got really sick playing wolfenstein in the early 1990's. After about three hours of play I threw up and had to lay down for the rest of the day. I was skeptical of doom when it came out, but the combination of a new computer and whatever work they did to speed up the rendering loop made it one of those games that I played for 15+ hour binges for a year or two at doom parties.
In the late 1990's I was part of an early VR motion sickness study at my uni, and I lasted about 20 mins before I refused to go any further, because I just wanted to get out before I threw up again.
So a couple years ago I was trying out all the new VR setups with the shorter head tracking->frame improvements, and I'm here to tell you I still get radically sick in any first person VR setup. 3rd person (moss, witchblood) i'm fine and can play for hours. But there is something about 1st person perspectives and i'm feeling it within a couple mins and I simply won't push myself to the point of throwing up again, its really miserable, its like being sea sick without the ability to stare at the horizon and feel better, or get quick relief upon return to dry land. It takes at least as long as I was immersed in it before I start feeling normal again.
PS: I also hate 24FPS movies, I find them really jerky even in a dark theater, with an actual projector. Especially pans just drive me bonkers, so maybe it was all the doom training/etc but I have a very low tolerance to low FPS video/games/etc.
Also: Big fan of Doom
> Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas.
Well, that's unreasonably nostalgic. I do agree that a lot of modern games confuse high quality art with effects, but past video games were heavily, and (to their creators) excruciatingly limited by technical feasibility, NOT by deliberate artistic choices.
The classics you remember are not what the creator imagined or wanted. It was the least painful compromise. The creators had two sticks and were hell-bent to build a space station with those. Completely unreasonable. Immensely frustrating. A masterpiece, but definitely not what the creators would have created given more options – least of all id software, which were nothing if not cutting edge.
Is it okay if I occupy the following ideological niche:
1. I love original doom. 2. I am very excited about what ray-tracing can do for games. 3. I have a ton of respect for doom modders and the doubtless huge amount of effort that went into this project. 4. I hate how this looks and wouldn't play it except as a curiosity
To me, the original doom was a piece of art, tuned by artists (I'll say it!) to look a certain way on the computer screen. Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas. A pinky demon standing in front of some mid-level gray barrels with greenish ooze... a spare clip - black, with a little orange.
I find that modern games tend to be really visually tiresome and unappealing. Often, this seems to come from overly contrasted, poorly lit scenes. Instead of a painting you get a bad photograph with too much or too little exposure. This seems to be largely the effect you get with ray-traced doom. Instead of the painting that is E1M1, you get this black room occasionally washed out by an awful fluorescent glow.
I think ray-tracing has the potential to create some amazing stuff, but retroactively applying it to doom rather predictably just makes... poorly balanced doom.
Of course that quote is now 15 years old, comes from a position of slef-confessed utter ignorance of the range of video games available even then, and was the answer to a question about Doom...
You wouldn't think of Doom/Quake/TF (or Pong/Pacman/Space Invaders) as art just like you wouldn't usually think of football, darts, scrabble or chess as art - generally you'd describe them as skill-based games or maybe sport.
While narrative-heavy games are unquestionably art just like movies or novels are, Ebert has only ever played Myst and some multimedia exploration game of Kyoto before he made that statement. He admitted near-complete ignorance of video games, so he wouldn't have known about, say, Planescape Torment or Monkey Island or Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis.
And of course Ebert is guilty of being a notorious edgelord too - he apparently also claimed that "hardly any movies are art" too...
Ray tracing is extremely costly for real time rendering and is almost never used unless there is some trickery. We have some limited amount of it now, especially since the Nvidia RTX series of GPUs, but rasterization is still king.
Among the trickery being used is raycasting, used in early 3D games like Doom, which is a kind of 2D ray tracing that works by column instead of by pixel. Real time ray tracing techniques, in particular signed distance field raymarching is a staple of the demoscene, this is made possible by using mathematically defined objects.
For prerendered graphics (ex: Pixar movies), the dominant technique is path tracing, it is a randomized variant of ray tracing that produces a noisy image that is progressively refined. It is even more costly than raytracing, but is much better at global illumination.
> I don't care much about high quality graphics, but I don't think I agree with your hypotheses about lower quality being better for imagination though. It's just another sort of uncanny valley.
Hmh, not sure. I agree on lighting being very important, but RTX-Quake looked just weird too. But imagination probably plays a role in games like doom where enemies are barely more than a couple pixels. It's like horror movies are scary because of the stuff that is only implied through storytelling and sound, as these things then happen directly in your brain and not on the screen.
> The major argument is somewhat philosophical. I don’t like what people expect out of CD games. Does anyone think that the cheeseball dialog in crash and burn is a GOOD addition? It turns my stomach. People expect CD games to have tons of digitized speech and video, and the 3DO is going to be strongly associated with it. The joke here is that if we ever do a CD version of DOOM, you are going to get the game and “The Making of DOOM” a one hour feature film. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars putting all this media into their games, and it often actually detracts from it. We don’t want to be part of this crowd.
> I would rather cut down to the essentials and fit on a cartridge than uselessly bulk up on a CD. I have a minimalist sense of aesthetics in game design.
It's kind of surprising to see John Carmack have what amounts to a "640k ought to be enough for everyone" moment here. As a guy that I see as somewhat of a futurist, developing on the edge of technology, it seems strange to see him be so dismissive to the potential of the massive storage space of CDs at the time.
There wasn't enough story for a movie. It was pretty enough to be a picture book, but how big is the market for picture books?
It was a puzzle game. The puzzles were pretty basic, but the market for basic puzzle games is significant. Especially if the puzzle is also attractive enough that the next batch of visuals feels like a decent reward for having solved the puzzle.
Such a game won't attract people who want more interaction from their games -- though you do have to remember that at the time even a game like Doom was a huge advance in interactivity. Myst was relaxing rather than exciting, almost the way a game of solitaire or a crossword puzzle is.
I disagree with the point that as a pure carnage simulator, "Doom is the closest thing you will be to a pure instrument of destruction whose sole function is to search and destroy", and that it stands the test of time as the greatest in the genre.
The Serious Sams, Bulletstorm, Painkiller (and others) have taken the Doom experience of finding a horde of somethings and killing them into the modern era, each with their own take.
Serious Sam expanded the levels and monster counts to a grotesque scale, allowing for perverse satisfaction in watching and killing off a distant and vast sea of fodder running towards you.
Bulletstorm lightened the mood, and as a precursor to the Gears of War series, was the first in my mind to make the action movie tropes of kicking and punching things, coupled with cheesy banter, genuinely pleasing.
Painkiller took the heavy metal influences, and merged them with some of the great settings from the previous century of horror novels and coupled it with immersive and creative level and weapon design.
I definitely believe that Doom was the original seminal piece in the genre, a Tolkien-esque work. But mankind has improved on the experience in the years since. Try those out too.
It's an old Carmack quote:
> Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.
It's why DooM was such an incredible novelty of fast paced 3d shooter, and Quake... Well.. Its devoid of character.
It's why HL & Fallout are so beloved.
I'm 100% with you
DOS Game Club is a discussion group for DOS games, much like a book club. We play the same DOS game for a month, discuss it on our forums and record a roundtable podcast afterwards.
For the first episode, we played Doom and then talked about it for 80 minutes with 3 of our members.
I think it has a recurring theme that any time he got involved, things didn't go well so he decided to let go of it.
That's not to say he didn't have influence; many times the games' stories were derived FROM the tech, not the other way around. Doom was originally supposed to be much more story- and character-driven, but that took a backseat given the focus on the development side was on the gameplay mechanics.
Also, this quote:
> Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important
From "Masters of Doom".
I'll shake my fist :D
Id software pioneered the shareware model in 1990 with Commander Keen, six years before they used it in Quake.
In fact, Keen, Keen 4, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom all used a three-episode shareware structure where the first episode was free and the rest were considered the "full version."
Doom 2 did not use this structure because Doom itself was a good enough advertisement for it. id then used it again in Quake, but fully broke from it with Quake 2, which just had a demo with a few levels.
>Other than the very beginning Doom is devoid of plot (and even then I didn't even know it took place on a moon of mars).
Doom didn't need a story. It wasn't that sort of game.
Doom is a game cut from the the gemstone of cutting edge technology perfect mechanics, sharpened against the edge of brilliant level design, polished to a mirror shine, and embellished by perfect sound and graphical design to match. It was an idea whose time had come, and I say that without irony. It's not about killing demons on Mars, it's about that feeling as you pick up a shotgun for the first time, and stare in awe as you reduce an imp to gibblets for the first time. The philosophy of Doom is summed up best by John Carmack:
"Story in a game is like story in a porn movie: It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
You can love story-based games, but to judge Doom by those criterion is comically missing the point, as Edge found out to their eternal shame: "If only we could talk to the monsters" indeed.
I haven't played it yet, but I really enjoyed the original Doom, and I am encouraged by how much of the original design philosphy stayed intact in the new installment (medkits+glory kills encourage you to stay on the on the offensive and on the move, minimal hitscan weaponry and smart enemy design discourage just staying in cover, keys and secret powerups encourage exploration, and there's still Carmack's story mentality ("story in a game is like story in a porn movie - it's expected to be there, but it's not that important"))
OTOH, given that I already have the original doom, is the new one really worth it? I mean, it's good, but it's not exactly going to beat the original at it's own game...
From their talks and interviews, I've gathered that both John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have always been in favor of standing experiences.
But...the early investor of Oculus is also the CEO, and he apparently has the weakest stomach for VR of anyone at the company. The hard line seems to have been set entirely by him.
Doom and Quake both made many people nauseous. So do rollercoasters, 3D movies, and Telsa Roadsters. There's no reason to eliminate experiences that most people can thoroughly enjoy. Fortunately, the fun camp seems to have won finally.
>If they knew what the next number to be pulled from the random number generator was, they could, for example, delay firing a weapon by a frame or two, to get more damage. Probably other more interesting things I can't think of immediately. If there was ever a bot vs bot Doom competition, this is something you'd definitely want to consider.
If you're interested in that kind of stuff, check out tasvideos.org, a community dedicated to beating old videogames as fast as possible using that type of knowledge. Since all videogame 'randomness' is really deterministic pseudo-randomness, the kind of RNG-knowing you described is ubiquitous
In fact, by coincidence, it looks like someone just recently published a DOOM (second episode) run: http://tasvideos.org/2825M.html
I remember something similar, though the real cause of my time on the computer ending was because I was on dialup and that would tie up the phone line. This was back when I was much younger and with my parents, but after my family moved all of our phones off the landline and to cellular, we ended up getting a lot more use out of the computer. After all, the computer only had entertainment purposes if you had a movie or a game, and all our games were the single player sort. So, with the advent of the Internet, there were things to do on the computer to pass the time, like browse webrings and forums or try and fail to learn Esperanto (and RPG Maker 95, which probably contributed a lot to my interest in game development).
Before all that, I spent a lot of time climbing trees and wanting to be an architect and writer (the latter of which I've been pursuing for a while now). My brother and I'd drag planks into trees and we'd build little things we called forts and make up our own currencies (using the tabs on soda cans, for example), we'd play with our family's chickens and cats, and we'd grouse about picking up fallen apples (because it was boring) and so on. Odd to think how little of any of that I'd get away with now -- now I'd suffer some odd looks from folks for climbing a tree that looked especially climbable. Really, the computer was just for Doom and Encarta and writing book reports. That's just rambling though and not all that interesting or indicative of any change other than growing up a bit.
Unfortunately, I was a child back then, so my memory of pre-Internet computer use is probably different than that of someone who was an adult the entire way through. Would be nice to see a bunch of people writing about it - not so much about how computers and the 'net changed things, but what they were like beforehand without concerning themselves too much with the difference between now and then.
That seems like a reasonable model; sort of a return to what some 90s games did, where you got Episode 1 of Doom free, and could pay to get another two episodes.