Slashdot Mirror
The History of Doom On All Systems
Consolevision writes: "This news from dcvision.com -- One of our great members (Steveffs) has written a great guide to the history of Doom, right from the beginning to the very newest ports of it, it is an exceptional read for those who have followed gaming for a long time. The History of Doom will take a short while to load as it is a rather large document but you will enjoy :)" This link is unfortunately to a .doc file, but Mr. Vision continues: "I have now split the History of Doom into 5 pages and converted to html for those who are having trouble with the rather large but very impressive doc file."
Here are the pieces: Page1,
Page2,
Page3,
Page4 and
Page5
Actually, no, it's because Doom is actually, I odn't know, fun. It had the right mix of the right things. I still play it to this day (whereas most FPSen bore me) -because the gameplay is good.- It hasn't been matched nor has anything similar been done since. (When you show me a recent FPS that handles lots and lots of enemies at a time while letting me move very quickly, let me know. I have yet to find one.)
In essence, screw the technical merits. :P
When Doom source was released and it suddenly got ported to every machine under the Sun, and people started improving the game engine. How can a "history of Doom" leave this out?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Other than the highly suspect grammar, the strange non-sequiteurs and exclamations ("He's alive!!!"), the bulleted list of DOOM levels and what looks like verbatim transcripts from the game documentation, was there really enough meat on this for even a mediocre slashdot news story, you think?
Must be a slow day. Having read the HTML versions of the 'article', I must say I wasn't particularly inclined to download the 3.6 megabyte Microsoft Word document, though I assume I'd be rewarded with some BMP screenshots to go with the text.
To the author. If you had to publish this as non-HTML document, you could and should have used Adobe Acrobat instead of Mickysoft Word.
If you wanted to make a list of DOOM ports, try at least to keep the list complete and accurate. I didn't see any mentioning of the unix, linux, Macintosh, BeOS, Amiga or Windows CE ports of the game. In any case, a list of ports is really not that interesting either unless you provide some back story and details for each. You could also provide download links and perhaps try and find and talk to some of the people responsible for those release. You know, try a little harder.
Until you get your piece written properly, anyone remotely interested in the subject should instead go and visit Doomworld (http://doomworld.com/ports/index.shtml) which has good FAQs, interviews, articles and links instead of just copy/paste fluff.