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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.'"
Although I appreciate this review being a old school gamer, it is impossible to give a great review on Doom 17 years later. Experiencing a game like this for the first time when there wasn't anything else like it was truly amazing. There are alot of nay-sayers commenting and they are most likely after doom's time. I just remember those late nights when everyone was asleep and all the lights were off. It was just you, a pair of headphones hooked up to your 8 bit sound blaster card, and the frightening glow of your 13 inch CRT screen. When you reached the later levels of the game where the monsters scream the most deathly noises you've ever heard, it almost made you shit your pants. Nonetheless I kept playing it over and over again. It really shaped future FPS games. Wolf 3D was awesome of course, but doom was simply a horror game. Great stuff.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I can't believe it has been 17 years.
I remember reading newsnet before DOOM came out. There was incredible buzz about the game. So much so that nearly every single post started with "DOOM:". People began to get tired of the prefix. Some suggested that the next game they get excited about have some super long name that couldn't be simply prefixed to a message title. Another person suggested the name "Smashing pumpkins into small piles of putrid debris." Yet another person countered that they would simply acronym it and all of the messages titles would be "SPISPOPD".
When DOOM was finally released, SPISPOPD was one of the cheat codes.
It was awesome.