Slashdot Mirror
Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time
sfraggle writes "Kotaku has an interesting review of Doom (the original!) by Stephen Totilo, a gamer and FPS player who, until a few days ago, had gone through the game's 17-year history without playing it. He describes some of his first impressions, the surprises that he encountered, and how the game compares to modern FPSes. Quoting: 'Virtual shotgun armed, I was finally going to play Doom for real. A second later, I understood the allure the video game weapon has had. In Doom the shotgun feels mighty, at least partially I believe because they make first-timers like me wait for it. The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have the shotgun, its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy. The shotgun is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact. The shotgun is the punch in the face the once-scrawny boy on the beach gives the bully when he returns a muscled linebacker.'"
Some of the writing is godawful:
Here's a list of ports he should try:
Skulltag
ZDaemon
GZDoom
Doom Legacy
Doomsday
All of these ports are purist-compatible, but also have default features that new gamers expect, like freelooking. Personally, I recommend Skulltag. It's got all of the things you want for playing Doom, plus it's got kickass multiplayer and can play every game ever made that was based off of the Doom engine ;)
Skulltag ZDaemon GZDoom Doom Legacy Doomsday
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
He missed the BFG 9000! Along with many other landmark innovations in Doom that set the benchmark for FPSes ever since.
Winds me up as much as noobs who think film started with Tarantino.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Mod parent as: WTF are you talking about?!?
Agreed, ZDoom provides a more solid experience and can still be configured to play just like the vanilla version. Chocolate Doom always works too. I find it funny that the guy didnt bump into Skulltag when looking for multiplayer. He wanted to try.... XBLA Doom II.... Blergh.
Umm... no.
The alcove is there, but there's not a shotgun in it, just on the decent difficult levels there's shotgun dudes there who will either kill you or drop tasty shotguns for you, depending on your hastiness/marksmanship quotient.
If he played on ITYTD or HNTR, then there's no sergeants, hence no shotguns, in that alcove.
FWIW Doom can, in places, be a game of precision aiming -- the pistol and chaingun both hit dead-true the first shot, and have (practically?) infinite range, so by tapping fire repeatedly, one can snipe quite awesomely with the chaingun, at about 2/3 the full rate of fire, but every shot hits. Of course, the weapon sprites aren't lined up to the center of the screen (even when not bobbing), so I taped a carefully aligned thread to my monitor. Since the vertical autoaim (which it seems the n00b in the article didn't understand) only works when you're in line horizontally, a single vertical thread is precisely the right aiming aid -- and makes chaingun sniping insanely effective in deathmatches.
Did you ever try Ultima Underworld? It was released *before* Wolf3D and was in many ways more advanced than Doom was. (Sloped ceilings and floors, up/down looking, jumping, water you could swim in, a physics model for throwing items, etc, etc)
Admitted, it's not an FPS but a first-person role playing game, but still - a game that really was years ahead of its time. And not only technologically.
Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me
You're unfamiliar with the new game journalism, eh?
Just wait till you see Doom 2. 7x 720k floppy disks? No game after Doom come close in making a truly awesome rocket launcher, imo.
You would know. Their 'waifu' are those stupid lolicon pillows.
http://www.geekologie.com/2009/07/29/2D-love.jpg
Doom? Is that supposed the old stupid game with the rickroll boom box?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aJjMOy-Ops
and the blue tails runnin thru map01 firing shotguns since tails are foxes are the best, on the multiplayer geting a DOUBLE KILLS and role play with MAH BOIS etc.
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Doom http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/LINK_MAH_BOIIIII
Doom's image has been tarnished plenty by these kinds of newbies these days. They no longer understand its contextual relevance and its significance.
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Shit_Nobody_Cares_About
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
3dfx is dead.
They've gone bankrupt since 2000
But I share your sentiments, once I got my Voodoo Banshee card and got some extra RAM in my Pentium I was king on earth.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
You mean GZdoom, not Zdoom - G is the one with 3d acceleration and OpenGL stuff.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Awesome indeed. What was even more awesome is when Smashing Pumpkins included Doom sound samples into their song "Where Boys Fear to Tread" as a nod to this joke.
>Under no circumstances should you have an online map open in your browser like the reviewer
Not to mention that Doom, unlike many modern games, has a built in automap. Just hit TAB and you should be looking at a live map that shows everywhere you have explored so far. Some levels even provide a power up that gives you the entire map. If you really have to, cheats will also reveal the entire map. From my experience exploring the levels was half of the fun. (Very much like Ulitma Underworld)
Running Doom in a web browser of all things does it a great injustice for a variety of experience, interface, and technological reasons. How did this guy fail to find Zdoom or Skulltag? Heck, with Skulltag you can play multiplayer Doom for free with a variety of Doom mods!