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Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time

Posted by Soulskill on from the new-is-relative dept.

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.'"

5 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. It's not as bad as it looks by pathological+liar · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some of the writing is godawful:

    I'd not played a shooter that looks like Doom. I'd not one that presented each of its figures as a stack of pixels rendered at the fever-dream intersection of real and colorful, relevant abstract. Be it dirt, blood, hair or the barrel of a gun, everything I saw was a block. Each block was a tile of a nightmare mosaic.

    ... the part that immediately follows is interesting though. There are some good bits.

  2. Re:in fact I wish I could find a way to by Iceykitsune · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  3. Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by WitnessForTheOffense · · Score: 3, Informative

    Mod parent as: WTF are you talking about?!?

  4. Re:mmmmm by crwl · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:17 years? OMG!!! by pak9rabid · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.