Doom Has Come to This World!

I just re-installed and was playing Doom 3 again and man, it's gorgeous! I mean the game itself is quite ordinary (sorry John, but more on this later) but the graphics! It's eye candy. I finished Doom 3 back when it was released, on my Ti 4200, and I was impressed, even though I couldn't turn on all the features. Now with my new card it's right out mind blowing. I mean, the lighting and shadows are so realistic, the normal-mapping so works for id, and I think they have used parallax-mapping (or displacement-mapping (I can't tell which, or is it simple bump-mapping?)) and many many more effects. The shear volume of verteces and effects the engine can handle is astonishing. Besides graphics, the movement of the monsters is also great. Those scary monsters crawling around on the walls and ceilings and jumping around, well, as I said, I'm pretty impressed. Now, all I've said here, was not at all about the game. It was about the engine. The game design is good that it's scary (at least it makes you jump,) and that it's kind of loyal to the Doom legacy, i.e. just shooting out a crazy bunch of monsters, with minimal puzzle solving and "adventuring." But it's not a real game of it's class. The artwork (graphics, level design, sound, voice-over, etc.) is good enough, but it just feels like an extremely long tech-demo (albeit a breath-taking one.) There are no complex objectives, no non-linearity (except a branching point early on, but the branches merge soon enough,) almost no environment interaction compared to the likes of Half-Life 2 (except this: try shooting a hanging lamp, and watch the light dance. Cool!) As a whole, Doom 3 is a good game, but I'm waiting for a Doom 3-engine based real game. Of course, this strategy of putting their focus on the engine is totally logical for id, since they make most of their money (that's a lot of money) from engine licensing. I haven't seen Quake 4 yet, but I think (and hope) that it's a smash hit.From what I've read and heard, Quake 4 goes back to a more story-oriented gameplay (a la Quake and Quake 2.) Oh, I forgot the best feature of Doom 3. It has the BFG9000! I mean, BFG10k in Quake III Arena was OK, but BFG9000 is something else! By the way, int the first 3 or so minutes of Doom 3, you enter a bathroom that has a big mirror. Seeing myself in the mirror suddenly took me about 9 or 10 years back, to the first times I was playing Duke Nukem 3D. In that game, Duke also enters a bathroom at some point (or many points) and you can see his reflection in the mirror. I remember my awe at that technological marvel, even though you could see Duke in the mirror only at fully-facing it or at profile.