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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.'"
Damn... I feel Old.
I stil have vivid memories of the first time I started Doom after 8 hours of downloading it off AOL. Unless you were a gamer at that time you have no idea what it was like to make that jump from Wolfenstein 3d to Doom.
Some of the writing is godawful:
Poetic prose or awkward adjective use, either way that description is characteristic of a non-gamer in my opinion. Perhaps I am a bit jaded, but are the words/phrases "2D sprite", "low-resolution", "models", and "textures" that much in the realm of jargon to be excluded from the current generation of mainstream gamers? Or am I pining for the days of yore?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Some people go through life without ever reading Homer or listening to Bach. I'm sure they don't feel that they're missing out on much either. Doom is that kind of foundational work that crystallizes what's great about what came before, and influenced everything that came after. If you like movies, you owe it to yourself to watch Hitchcock and Kurosawa. If you like games, you owe it to yourself to play Doom. If you don't like games, skip it, no biggie.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I didn't care much for Doom as a single player game. NetDOOM was where it was at. Pray your network card's IPX drivers didn't suck and crash out all the time, and make sure all your T's and terminators are tight for that awesome coax 10-base-2 network goodness. 10-base 2 because - lets face it - you can't afford a hub. But, hearing your buddies drop the f-bomb in the next room over when you fragged them was GOLD. Lan parties were so much fun. Also, if he played it without music, he was doing it wrong. The music of DOOM was simply awesome with the SB16 with the MIDI daughterboard attached.
You forgot the other aspects of Doom. This was one of the two games(Doom, Mortal Kombat) labeled by government officials at the time to be the root cause of increase in teen violence, drugs and all that bull.
Getting your hands on a copy of either of Doom or Mortal Kombat at the age of 8 was like getting your hands on a copy of Playboy at 13.
My father happened to pick up the shareware copy of Doom for us. I was considered a king at the age of 8. A year later my friends older brother managed to get his hands on Doom 2. You cant recreate this, now a days you just go online and download an EXE. Back then if you had no source of income you had to find someone who just happened to have a source for the game.
Oh and lets not forget. Back then when a game didn't have the minimum requirements, it wouldn't even load. So even if you got your hands on a copy, you still needed to figure out how to get the damn thing to run. We waited 8 weeks for my neighbor to make us a boot disk to run Doom. Something today I could do in 10 minutes, I patiently waited 8 weeks for a boot disk that was capable of loading C:, a CD drive, and Sound with just enough memory to run Doom.
From the age of 8 to 12, I had to find sources for Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom 2, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem, Quake, and Shadow Warrior. By 1997 most game magazines came with CD's packed with Demos so the fun in waiting and imagining what the game was like were over.
That depends on what you're looking for. If I want absolute realism, my Mom does a better job with a disposable camera than Van Gogh. However, I certainly wouldn't claim for an instant that the family album even registers on the artistic scale next to Starry Night. I can take a better picture than Mom using a 35 mm camera with actual attention to focus, stop, and appropriate film speed. It looks better and it's technically superior, but still not a blip next to Vincent on the artistic scale.
I can capture what a starry night LOOKS like quite well, but Van Gogh somehow captured what it FELT like to look at the starry night.
I'm not trying to raise Doom up to that level, just pointing out that sometimes the technically inferior is artistically superior. It may be that those very imperfections are necessary to the artistic value. For some, the less perfect graphics of Doom may create a superior atmosphere.