Yesterday afternoon I went down to Game Stop and bought Doom 3 and its expansion pack.
This is a very difficult game. I suspect that you have to be an excellent FPS player to do well at the game, but that doesn’t really describe me these days.
I always did really really well at the original Doom and other games based on its engine, but I think that’s mostly because it wasn’t true 3D – no need to worry about the z axis when shooting. I could play the whole game on Ultra-Violence without dying very often.
When Quake came out and all three dimensions were important, I found myself behind the curve and not able to play as well. On Doom 3, I have major trouble if I play any higher than the first difficulty level, which is Recruit. I tried Marine once, and don’t dare try Veteran. Nightmare isn’t even selectable … anyone know what it takes to unlock it?
The expansion pack is much more interesting than the regular game … you can in many ways call Doom 3 a very souped up version of Doom, and the expansion pack a souped up version of Doom II. The monsters in the regular game are the same as the original game, with immensely better graphics and much more terror.
I have a feeling that my laptop just barely meets requirements for the game. It’s got an ATI Radeon 9700 Mobility, but the hard drive is a slow 5400 RPM beast and it’s only got 512MB RAM. Maybe I need to create a hardware profile for gaming that has a lot of stuff disabled.
2 responses to “i feel like sombody taped my lips to the tailpipe of a bus”
If you are using one of those Dells that peeps got with the tuition reimbursment from the Vyrg, you are running about at capacity I think. I believe that hte video card uses some of the system RAM.
I can tell you that I had to turn everything way down to play Doom3 on my old system (Athlon 1500+, nVidia 5700 with 256 RAM, 1 gig system RAM). I have not tried it yet on my new system (Athlon64 3400+) yet, but I hear that I still don’t have the horsepower to go full out. Remeber when games were simple?
I know what you are talking about with your 9100. But I just wanted to let you know that you can upgrade that machine. I think it can handle up to 2 gig of memory plus a faster and larger hard drive. The video memory is on the Video card and does not share with the system memory. Here is the video card stats from Dell:
CARD (CIRCUIT), GRAPHICS, ATI TECHNOLOGIES INC, M11, 64MB, 9100
You can look them up if you add its service number on dells website.
Even though the 9100s are huge and ugly they are still a really good box for the causual gamer and the regular user. I always take mine to LAN parties and play BF2 on it which is the most demanding game I have ever played.
I have since upgraded mine with a integrated wireless card and blue tooth. My next buy if I can ever afford it will be an upgade to at least 1 gig of total memory. BE warned if you upgrade the RAM I have been told they have to be in pairs so if you want to upgrade you will have to dump the 2x256MB sodimms in it.