I think it's obvious that the whole flashlight thing was a deliberate mechanism the game designers used to enhance the shit-yourself-silly factor of the game. If they put the (logical) flashlight on your gun or shoulder or forhead, then you would be able to easily see in the endless dark rooms and corridors while having your gun out. It would cut the tension by like 75% if you ask me. Half the freakiness is that you know you're in a dark room, you can barely see anything with the light on, you hear a screech or a growl, and you only hope you see where it came from before you lower the light and take the gun out and start shooting and running around in the dark while pissing yourself.
If you ask me, limitations like these add a lot of good suspense to games. One of my gripes with Doom is that you can have weapons/flashlight out while on a ladder... What's up with that? Also, is it me, or is there like no recoil for the guns? It would be even scarier if shooting the shotgun made you kick up and lose your aim every shot, or the automatic guns slowly kicked up and lost accuracy is you didn't use burst fire. Also, reloading clips is too generous in that you never lose excess ammo in a clip if you decide to reload at 40/60. Things like this make the game easier (too easy imo) and less tense. I'm on the marine difficulty (or whatever is below nightmare, the hardest it lets you play first time around) and I -never- have ammo problems. The only thing I ever run even remotely low on is cell-ammo. My opinion? Doom should have had ammo loss when reloading before a clip was out. This would make players ration their ammo better and add more freakiness because you'd run down your clip and have to sweat a little instead of kicking in a new clip ever 1/3 way through.
I like being able to hold 10 weapons, but do they really need to baby me and give me more ammo than I know what to do with for all of them
