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One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)
Posted By: AntarcticoDate: 8/14/13 9:18 p.m.

In Response To: Aleph One 1.1b3 (treellama)

: Beta 3... restoration of the controversial multiple weapons bug.

Until I started testing Pfhoraphobia under beta 3, I did not realize how much my appreciation of what a pain in the ass the Total Carnage multiple weapons pick up bug is had dulled over the years. As my Marathon timeline progressed, in the later years I played more M2 and MI than Marathon, both under Aleph One and not, and so the mechanics in those later games became normal and my memories of multiple weapon pick-ups faded. The last few times playing through Marathon were under M1A1 and it had its own special eccentricities to occupy my attention with (dippy PID opening, monster activation meaning all the damn monsters activating, etc.), but because it is basically M2 in Marathon drag, there was no multiple weapons pick up on TC, and by that time my memories of that particular quirk were quite weak. However, after today's testing of Pfhoraphobia, vidding it on Total Carnage, and having to face down a hall full of trap closet monsters with a scavenged Alien Weapon, having it run dry, and then knowing that, because of the narrow confines I had to run over two weapons to get one, and that other weapon went "pifft" into the aether because of our newly emulated weapons bug, well, that was fairly infuriating.

But Ant, you might say, it adds a tactical quality, forcing you to carefully pick where you kill Enforcers so you can maximize your Alien Weapon bounty. I call BS on this because one, if you want to maximize your Alien Weapon pick-ups you don't emulate the bug in the first place, and two, quite often, as in the above battle, in the narrows of a Pfhor ship you don't have squat in the way of deciding where to drop an Enforcer firing on you. Once the killing is over, if you have the luxury of time and nothing is trying to pop off your head, you might take your finger off the run key for a moment, wade through the Pfhor corpses, and kind of sidle on up to a nested pair of Alien weapons like you might furtively approach a couple of shy girls at a school dance. Then, with fingers trembling ever so slightly from the wash of adrenaline, you hope you don't nudge that forward key just a little too far and irretrievably gobble up both overlapping guns. Playing monkey games like this does not make for tactical or strategic game play, but it does break immersion in the game as it pulls you into sort of a retarded mini-game of playing footsie with weapons sprites.

Oh but Ant, you might counter, the Alien Weapon is not the only reason my heart goes doki doki for the multiple weapons bug, it also allows me to maximize my ammo for my human weapons, and this is vital for my style of gameplay! OK, I am going to call double-plus BS on this. If you are vidding a level, you are probably punching everything approachable on foot into a fine bloody pulp, and when you have successfully pounded your map into submission, you will have probably fired all of 3-4 pistol rounds and will be warping off the map with enough unused ammo to keep a Syrian rebel in bullets until the next Hajj, all with or without the multiple weapons bug.

But, all vidding makes Jack a dull boy, so let's say you are playing for fun and only fisting your foes occasionally, you know to keep shit real and all, but mostly you are a gun toting maniac who is gleefully mowing down your foes with the UESC's finest tools of wanton destruction. Even without the multiple weapons bug, are you really running short on ammo boychick? Good gawd, on my full run through of beta 2, spraying projectiles, explosives, and pew-pews at anything that moved, at the end of Ingue Ferroque I had in my inventory the following:

-- 82 Pistol Clips
-- 69 Fusion Batteries
-- 36 AR Clips
-- 50 Grenade Clips
-- 23 Napalm Canisters
-- 22 Pairs of SPNKR Missiles
-- One Alien Weapon with 100% ammo

Sure, if the multiple weapons bug had been emulated in beta 2, I would have been able to hoard even more ammo. And that's the thing the bug is really good for, hoarding ammo, which is exactly what I used it for BITD. Yea man, I would wait till my AR was as empty as a broken heart, and when it was, I would backtrack to that fresh AR I saw half a map ago and run over that sucker -- mmmm...sweet, free ammo. And, how ridiculous is that? Really, the next step in that derailed train of thought would be to start saving stacks of old magazines because there were articles in them I had not read yet, but might get around to one day. Twenty years down the road, I would inexorably become one of those people who get a half-column inch in the local coupon clipper after my corpse was found buried under an avalanche of my accreted periodicals.

So, to put short what I have already said long, the newly emulated multiple weapons bug gives us two rather dubious features:

-- An annoying, tedious, immersion breaking mini-game of weapon sprite footsie, and....

-- A "tool" only useful for hoarding even more ridiculous quantities of unneeded ammo.

Neither of these "features" adds to the quality or challenge of gameplay, (unless you equate frustration with challenge), which is why Bungie fixed the bug in Marathon 2. There was never supposed to be this multiple pick up on TC behavior, and to break a game, even if slightly, all in the name of canon and nostalgia is, or should be, faintly embarrassing to all involved.

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

Aleph One 1.1b3treellama 8/13/13 5:31 p.m.
     Re: Aleph One 1.1b3poena.dare 8/13/13 5:40 p.m.
     Re: Aleph One 1.1b3PerseusSpartacus 8/13/13 7:36 p.m.
           Re: Aleph One 1.1b3treellama 8/14/13 4:22 a.m.
                 Re: Aleph One 1.1b3PerseusSpartacus 8/14/13 8:26 a.m.
     Re: Aleph One 1.1b3Antarctico 8/13/13 11:50 p.m.
           Re: Aleph One 1.1b3Godot 8/14/13 4:44 a.m.
                 Re: Aleph One 1.1b3Antarctico 8/14/13 6:09 a.m.
     Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/14/13 12:57 a.m.
           Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/14/13 1:38 a.m.
                 Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)treellama 8/14/13 3:41 a.m.
                       Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/14/13 4:32 a.m.
                       Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/14/13 4:41 a.m.
           Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/14/13 4:04 a.m.
                 Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/14/13 12:24 p.m.
                       Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/14/13 2:37 p.m.
                             Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/14/13 11:13 p.m.
                                   Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/16/13 5:48 p.m.
                                         Memory Is A Funny Thing (was: Beta 3 Testing...)Antarctico 8/16/13 6:24 p.m.
                                         Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/16/13 10:32 p.m.
                       Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Hopper 8/16/13 7:14 a.m.
                             Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)PerseusSpartacus 8/16/13 7:20 a.m.
                             Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/16/13 7:44 a.m.
                       Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Hopper 8/17/13 9:52 a.m.
                             Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/17/13 10:43 a.m.
                                   Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/17/13 10:55 a.m.
                                         Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)treellama 8/17/13 11:12 a.m.
                                         Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Hopper 8/17/13 11:37 a.m.
                                               Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/17/13 12:08 p.m.
                                                     Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Dr. John Sumner 8/18/13 2:41 a.m.
                                                           Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/18/13 3:04 a.m.
                                                                 Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Dr. John Sumner 8/18/13 3:19 a.m.
                                                                       Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Godot 8/18/13 3:41 a.m.
                                                                             Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Dr. John Sumner 8/18/13 4:09 a.m.
                                                                                   Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Hopper 8/18/13 8:01 a.m.
                                                                                         Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Dr. John Sumner 8/18/13 8:33 a.m.
                                                                                         OK. I Think I'm On To Something (was: Beta 3 Test)Antarctico 8/18/13 6:33 p.m.
                                                                                               Re: OK. I Think I'm On To Something (was: Beta 3 THopper 8/18/13 9:27 p.m.
                                                                                                     Re: OK. I Think I'm On To Something (was: Beta 3 TAntarctico 8/19/13 12:57 a.m.
                                                                 Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/18/13 6:35 p.m.
                                                     Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/18/13 8:27 a.m.
                                         Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/17/13 1:22 p.m.
                             Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)Antarctico 8/18/13 8:56 a.m.
           Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)PerseusSpartacus 8/14/13 12:08 p.m.
                 Re: Beta 3 Testing (was: Aleph One 1.1b3)PerseusSpartacus 8/15/13 1:52 p.m.
     Re: Aleph One 1.1b3Godot 8/14/13 4:03 a.m.
           Re: Aleph One 1.1b3poena.dare 8/14/13 5:01 a.m.
                 Re: Aleph One 1.1b3Antarctico 8/14/13 6:10 a.m.
                 Re: Aleph One 1.1b3Godot 8/14/13 9:05 a.m.
     Re: Aleph One 1.1b3Godot 8/14/13 7:22 a.m.
     One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Antarctico 8/14/13 9:18 p.m.
           Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)treellama 8/15/13 4:22 a.m.
                 Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Godot 8/15/13 4:53 a.m.
                       Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Dr. John Sumner 8/15/13 5:29 a.m.
                             Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Godot 8/15/13 5:52 a.m.
                                   Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)treellama 8/15/13 6:08 a.m.
                                         Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Godot 8/15/13 6:27 a.m.
                                               Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)treellama 8/15/13 6:45 a.m.
                                                     Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Godot 8/15/13 7:13 a.m.
                                                           Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)PerseusSpartacus 8/15/13 7:23 a.m.
                                                           Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Hopper 8/16/13 11:03 a.m.
                                                           Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Antarctico 8/16/13 2:29 p.m.
                                                                 Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Godot 8/16/13 11:04 p.m.
                                                                       Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Godot 8/16/13 11:15 p.m.
                                                                             Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)treellama 8/17/13 10:57 a.m.
                             Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)treellama 8/15/13 5:56 a.m.
                                   Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Dr. John Sumner 8/15/13 6:27 a.m.
                                         Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Godot 8/15/13 6:35 a.m.
                                         Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Antarctico 8/16/13 2:48 p.m.
                             Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Dispatcher 8/15/13 6:54 a.m.
                 Re: One Man's Canon Is Another's PITA (long)Antarctico 8/16/13 2:12 p.m.

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