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Comment by cpuguy83 | Hacker News Reader

This was the first (only?) game that legit had me jumpy. I remember one part of the game where I was in this room and a monster walked across the window, saw me, then came around and started pounding on the door. Each time the door dented a bit more until it gave out.

I don't think I saw a game before Doom3 that was quite like that.

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The problem is that the whole "all doors close, light turns off, monsters spawn", or the lighter version of "door opens behind, monsters come from it", or sometimes "monsters teleport behind you" was the entirety of the gameplay. The first few times it made me jump, but then it just became boring. Pretty soon you could predict when it'd happen, too.

The other cheap trick was to make half of all maps so dark you need a flashlight, but make it so that you couldn't use a weapon while the flashlight was out. IIRC the very first Doom 3 mod was the one that fixed that, and it was called simply "duct tape".

The classic Alien vs Predator (I think?) had me literally falling out of the chair when a facehugger jumped at me :)

Only game I ever played where I remained unmoving in one corner for half an hour and was not bored.

Something I loved about that game was that stopping didn't make you safe - if you stopped for too long the aliens would come and find you. This lead to a intense experience where you had to keep going - even when terrified - because stopping was even scarier.

During the LAN party era my friends and I played the crap out of that series. The engine wasn't as sophisticated as what iD et all were doing, but worked perfectly fine for the gameplay. We'd spend hours trying to one up each other in deathmatch.

Another gem of a game I think a lot of people overlooked that has some similarities is Natural Selection 2. This is a sort of aliens vs space marines FPS and RTS hybrid. It never really blew up but still has a community.

My friends and I only bot bashed. NS2 was much desired but fell flat for us.

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