Old Doom VS Retail Doom

I was looking at old reviews and interviews of Doom 1 and Quake 1 and I came across some interesting videos showing an early version of Doom.

What's interesting to me is how the levels have changed quite a bit, some levels are completely different and are much bigger!
Some rooms in the final version of Doom used to be secret rooms, so it's interesting to see how things have changed during the development process.

Here are some shots comparing the old version to the final version.

 

As you can see, the room is completely gone... Or so you'd think!
The same room is behind the armor as a secret room leading to a shotgun, in the final version the secret room is no longer a secret and the armor has replaced the shotgun.

The next room looks nothing like the final version, pretty boring with almost no details heh.

The last room I'm going to show is pretty similar but notice the Imp "fireball" it's some sort of weird star in the old version.

Overall the final version looks a lot better and polished, more detail and such, but it's still very interesting to see the old stuff, especially the later levels as they are much bigger and include stuff that you won't see in the final version of Doom.
You can have a look at the video yourself, the Doom gameplay doesn't start till about 09:30 so fast forward if that's all you're interested in.
YouTube Link

Burnout, what happened?

I'm a big fan of Burnout, I've played every single game since the first Burnout was released.
But later games in the series seems to have gotten much less "serious"...

In Burnout 1 the slightest collision would result in a big crash, which I admit was pretty hard.
Burnout 2 was a bit more gentle on the crashing, just about perfect imo.
But in Burnout 4, you can crash into cars from behind over and over again without it resulting in a real crash, the other car just goes flying while you're basically unharmed.

Same with the nitro, in Burnout 1 getting nitro was something special, you'd work your way up and finally get a whole nitro bar you could spend as you liked.
In Burnout 2 nitro was a bit more common but if you used nitro you had to keep holding down the nitro button till the bar was empty or you'd have to fill it up again before you could use it.
If you take a look at Burnout Paradise all you have to do is drive by a gas station and you get full nitro.

They've basically removed the best part of Burnout, you'd do some risky tricks, like drive on the wrong side of the road or narrowly evading collisions, just to fill up that nitro bar and in the end, boosting away from everyone else!
Now it doesn't really matter what you do, you can bounce between walls and cars and just drive into a gas station and you're good go.

Burnout 3 for me lies right on the edge of the series change, it's kept some of its strictness but has been made simpler and crazier, taking away some of the serious aspects of the two previous games.Burnout 2 has always been my favorite and Burnout 1 coming in as second, and I've always wondered why they made the rest of the Burnout games so easy and silly.
Recently I found this on Wikipedia:

Burnout 1: "This game was often criticized for its music, replays, and its difficulty."

Burnout Series: "It was not until the release of Burnout 3: Takedown that the series would have mass appeal to US players."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_(series))

So apparently, Burnout was just too hard for the US players, so later games in the series were made simpler.
I think it's pretty sad that such a great game has been reduced to what it is today, just to get more sales, but maybe the profit is all that matters?

And that's all I have to say for now, toodles. _o/