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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.'"
Plus, it's on Kotaku, the home of anime-obsessed nerds who love video games more than sex.
I think I'll pass.
Damn... I feel Old.
So by interesting, you mean it's another stupid online review wherein the reviewer decides that demonstrating his incomparable verbosity and masterful use of metaphors is more important than actually imparting any sort of useful information? How fun!
Some of the writing is godawful:
needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports and not the dos box one.
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.
WTF? You know I thought I understood the simple premise of the game but apparently not because I'm 24 now and testicles show no sign of dropping, Doom or no Doom.
Chesticles maybe?
He must have been seriously stuck for something to write about it.
it's under construction
as you type this from your mom's basement wondering what it would be like to have a girlfriend......
I played it for the first time only last year, and was pleasantly surprised. The controls are perfect. I felt like the shareware Episode I was most enjoyable, perhaps because I was reluctant to use the plasma and rocket weapons when they became available. The later episodes also seemed to involve me getting hemmed in more often.
Personally, I prefer Doom: The Roguelike overall, but Doom is still a fine, if ugly, shooter.
He played it 3 times. He used the shotgun a couple times, died, and decided it wasn't fun enough to bother playing for free on the web (flash) or by any other means.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
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
Well, by all means walk into a story about the game tell us how you're still not playing it. That's a great way to avoid a -1 troll.
Eat sleep die
News for nerds: [x]
Stuff that matters: [ ]
That doesn't even make sense considering GP said he never played it. If anything, by not playing it, it signifies that it's more likely GP has achieved far more tail than otherwise.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
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*
He went HOW FAR without getting a shotgun? On the one true difficulty level (ultra violence) you get a shotgun just off to the left alcove from where you begin the game.
Also way better played with the mouse for aiming... but we all know that already...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Doom was brilliant.I remember not having many PC games but knowing a lot of them sucked, and was familiar with Wolfenstein on the SNES. I finally got the disks for the trial version and was blown away. Sure I had to letterbox it, but the experience was so immersive and thrilling, it was obvious this was the future of PC gaming. I spent most of 1997 playing Doom II during my CAD class and enjoyed every second of it.
What sucks is that it has created and endless series of non-innovating FPS games, much like Street Fighter II spawned an endless series of fighting games. I have not played any PC games since Doom II because none of them do anything of interest beyond what Doom brought. FPS games also brought 3D gaming to the forefront and killed 2D games for good.
He should play it next... and on a cellphone (at the very least is available for the N900). Then we will get an interesting review,
Was he watching hot gay porn while writing this?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I was working the overnight shift, not much to do, and they had just gotten a new PC for the computer room. It had a big, 17 inch monitor, a zippy 486 under the hood and even a decent sound card. I downloaded the game, put it on a floppy and told my guys to watch the control room while I went upstairs for a bit.
I popped the disk in and started up the game. I remember how immersive it felt, the sound, the three D graphics. I really felt like I was part of the game. Three in the morning, all alone in the computer room, the growls of demons in my ears...it was pretty damn freaky.
Do the bastardized versions he was playing not have weapon drops? Was he playing on ITYTD?
Not that I necessarily disagree with (the point of) his flowery metaphors, but I have a hard time seeing how he could think he's played it now.
It's been a fair few years now since I've had a Doom dream. Probably because I've not run through the game for about the same time. Used to load it up, clear through the entire game in 30 mins as warmup to playing/doing anything else on the computer, and/or as a last thing before powering off for the night.
Backpage of PC..Pro?Gamer? (one with David McCandless writing for it), there was a comment about Doom Dreams and I suddenly realised what I'd been having the last few weeks.
They'd be normal dreams perhaps, perfectly normal settings, no hideous demons throwing fireballs, but the movement...
Soon as I started to strafe in a game, or run up and keep nudging a door to open it, I'd be aware that I was dreaming, and it was a Doom Dream. Never had that since for any other game.
Also, some dreams would have be carrying something and it'd be that gentle swaying motion. And I'd be lucid again that I was dreaming.
Perhaps I should load it up and play for a few nights before hitting the sack, see if I can duplicate the effect.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have ...its big shots and its slow, fetishized ... stuff of macho fantasy. [It] 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.
I remember uploading Doom to my local BBS. I don't remember it being quite the right-of-passage depicted here.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Oh man did I play the crap out of those games, and boy were they ever fun. Man did I love Hexen.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
News Flash! Gamer plays a game! Water is wet! Richard Simmons is gay! The sky is blue!
The game.
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!
http://www.kongregate.com/games/mike_id/doom-1
The ______ Agenda
Here, let me summarize: It's like sex.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Ahhh, Doom. At my college there were three types of computer labs:
486 PCs: For Doom.
IBM Mainframe terminals: For IRC.
Unix X terminal workstations: For software development.
At least that's what 90% of the people in each type of lab would be doing at any given time.
Better known as 318230.
I watch Homer 5 nights a week, that count?
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.
During college, when I was doing everything in Emacs (Even the writing class, that was LaTeX in Emacs), I had some Emacs Dreams.
It is really disturbing to be dreaming about syntax highlighting, and a bunch of glowing characters against a black background.
(I have never had a VI dream, so I guess that shows where my allegiance lies)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Macho fantasy? Instant puberty? Potency??? What is has this guy been learning that makes him interpret things in such an absurd manner? Sure, the shotgun was a great weapon, but jeez. The shotgun in DOOM is highly destructive because REAL shotguns are highly destructive. Whatever is ten feet in front of a shotgun gets DESTROYED. I suppose it goes without saying that the author has never fired a BOOMstick in real life, and instead chooses to imagine it in terms of what he thinks about daily.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
No shotgun? Here's what you need my friend.
All I have to say after looking at their logo is 2 Girls, 1 cup.
Had to learn TCPIP early on
Wasn't Doom IPX/SPX? I don't recall TCP/IP support.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I had to double check the link to make sure I wasn't reading The Onion:
Ugh.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
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.
For regular old Doom, it was the cursor keys. For Quake as well, in it's original offering, IIRC.
Plus "," and "." were strafe. Joy.
Anyone who wants to repeat this experiment, and not a "purist," should grab gzDoom, which is zDoom with OpenGL rendering and light effects. Works great in Windows with the original .WAD files. Even runs "Strife," which is a pretty cool Doom engine game from a history perspective.
I would just set the controls to whatever FPS style you like. The original controls for Doom and Quake were horrible.
--
Toro
DOOM is the most important game ever. It was the game that opened the floodgates for 3d games.
Yup seriously dude, avoided Doom for all these years and then decides on FLASH Doom! WTF... I think this guy didn't play Doom for all these years because he is a bit mentally deficient. And then... XBox demo... ohhh man.
Then we wrights the review after the first level it seems... please stop... or at the very least stick with reviewing XBox games.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
But Quake, now that was freaking awesome! Of all the FPSes I've played, I still like the original Quake weapons over anything else. Tribes II came close, but even that fell short.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Castle Wolfenstein 30 years late.
main() {1;}
Someone played Doom. Stop the presses. I played it again two months ago - maybe I should have it published somewhere I actually prefer old Doom to the weird thing they did with Doom3. I still miss the days when you could play FPSs without needing a mouse.
I read the doom article and was disgusted, but at least the spinach article was on idle, probably where this belonged...
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
iddqd
Shit. I just had one of those realisations that I'm properly middle aged.
I was reading this 'review' of a guy vaguely dabbling in Doom and it was annoying me. A proper 'you young people, you don't understand' moment. Doom was fucking mind blowing at the time.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
First, you did not need to look for it - in Doom I, you got it as soon as you shot the guys in the first chamber on the left, and it was easy to get one in the other version, too. Second, shotgun? Meh. The biggest fun is doing the level with the chainsaw only, no iddqd :D
Nightmare ...
Now he needs to play Castle Phobos, Cleimos (preferably the extended Doom 2 version), Mak's Doomdom, Yakworld, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten. Oh, 'Tower' or anything else by Jim Flynn.
It's kind of weird, I've been playing through Fallout 3 and suddenly had this urge to play Doom again. I'm using Chocolate Doom (since Legacy doesn't seem to compile properly for 64-bit) and Castle Phobos in particular has kept me on the edge of my seat.
I always felt that the original levels left something to be desired. In particular the way the level titles had no resemblance to the levels themselves. If it hadn't been for the masses of WAD files out there, it wouldn't really have had much staying power with me.
IMHO he needs to play Castle Phobos, Cleimos (preferably the extended Doom 2 version), Mak's Doomdom, Yakworld, and probably a dozen others I've forgotten. Oh, 'Tower' or anything else by Jim Flynn, and 'DMBBATH' which while sadly incomplete does try really, really hard to make a hangar that looks like a hangar, a chemical plant that is full of machinery and so on and so forth.
It's kind of weird, I've been playing through Fallout 3 and suddenly had this urge to play Doom again. I'm using Chocolate Doom (since Legacy doesn't seem to compile properly for 64-bit) and Castle Phobos in particular has kept me on the edge of my seat.
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.
Shut the fuck up you pretentious son of a bitch, viz a viz my ass.
What happens when this guy gets a BFG ?
"I began to stress that I would not find the famous weapon. Eventually I found the cheats, of course, and unlocked all the weapons"
FAIL, Stephen Totilo!
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
Yep. There's still no feeling like shotgunning imps in any other game I've played. I think it's partly the sound they make when they die as well.
Blam! Oooo!
Blam! Ooo!
Blam! Aaaah!
Blam! Oooo!
etc.
I've got DOOM II on my laptop.
No sig today...
I love how the technical deficiencies of the time can now be re-interpreted as not only intentional but also artistic and even metaphorically meaningful...
And I wonder if that happened before in other contexts.
... or maybe even Rockbox Doom.
It is kind of disturbingly cool to play Doom on an audio player, even if the controls are a touch clunky.
I love how the limitations of the time are now being re-interpreted as not only intentional but also as artistically meaningful.
One has to wonder how often that happened in other historical contexts before.
Forgot all that prose from Kotaku. Doom 2 with the Army of Darkness mod said it much more succinctly. I spent my days making demons howl and die amid shouts of "Come get some!" and "This is my BOOMSTICK!" Man I miss games like that.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
If pixel resolution was the only important thing in a game you'd be right.
OTOH I think the game the weapons/sounds/enemies/maps of DOOM are still among the very best ever. Certainly better than, eg., Alien Swarm (which is fashionable at the moment).
If DOOM was released tomorrow with better graphics you'd be all, "Best game ever!"
PS: Does anybody know if there's a version of DOOM with, say, double or triple resolution sprites? I know there's a bunch of "ports" out there but all the ones I've tried are like "ports" of Space Invaders or Pacman. They look liek Space Invaders/Pacman but there's always something wrong with the gameplay, some little rule which they don't quite follow. I want original doom, higher resolution... (please)
No sig today...
The Xbox option was attractive, but I was not going to sully my first Doom experience with a video game controller.
There's nothing wrong with the Xbox 360 port (or any other console port, for that matter), even if you swear by mouse/keyboard on FPSes. Doom was perfectly playable on keyboard alone, because up/down aiming was automatic. Works perfectly well on one digital directional pad and a few buttons, and the Xbox 360 port translates it pretty naturally to the dualstick layout.
It was only in Quake when people started craving for mouselook, when four buttons wasn't quite enough to move and aim.
That said, it's slightly annoying that Xbox 360 version runs in software mode and doesn't have any of the hardware-accelerated niceties in later source ports, but it doesn't make the game much worse. =)
The Xbox option was attractive, but I was not going to sully my first Doom experience with a video game controller.
There's nothing wrong with the Xbox 360 port (or any other console port, for that matter), even if you swear by mouse/keyboard on FPSes. Doom was perfectly playable on keyboard alone, because up/down aiming was automatic. Works perfectly well on one digital directional pad and a few buttons, and the Xbox 360 port translates it pretty naturally to the dualstick layout.
It was only in Quake when people started craving for mouselook, when four buttons wasn't quite enough to move and aim.
That said, it's slightly annoying that Xbox 360 version runs in software mode and doesn't have any of the hardware-accelerated niceties in later source ports, but it doesn't make the game much worse. =)
I still think I'm the first person in the world to finish E1M3 on nightmare level, starting with just a pistol. This is the one where you open the door and already have one or two invisible pinkies munching on you, and soldiers sniping on you as well... Ah, the good times. :)
and I cannot lie.
Blam! Ooooh!
Blam! Errrk!
Blam! Oooh!
Blam! Oooh!
Blam! Errrk!
Pixels aside, I don't think any other game has ever replicated the feeling of shotgunning a room full of imps (and it still works today just as well as it worked back then).
Doom's weapons/enemies/sounds/maps are perfect.
No sig today...
body {color:purple;}
WTF? According to the fine article instead of playing the very decent Chocolate Doom he played a flash version, without sound. The sound - alongside playing in a room where your monitor is the only light source - is one of the most important parts of the experience. I still remember cowering in a dark corner of E1M2 for what seemed like an age, terrified by the imps i could hear around me, but not see.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Kurosawa? Bach? Seriously? If I were looking for analogies to Doom in other media, I'd go with the myth of Cronos devouring his children rather than The Odyssey, and "Anchors Aweigh" rather than "Mass in B Minor". Flashy, unsophisticated crowd pleasers. In film a better analogy would be Friday the 13th.
Though maybe you're right, and Doom really is the foundation upon which modern gaming is built, and a standard touchstone for the medium. If cinema had followed the same path, then the majority of new releases would be slasher films, and most of the rest would follow the same conventions, regardless of genre: lots of dark shadows, an ensemble cast that slowly gets reduced to a single protagonist and antagonist, a fake ending before the final climax, etc.
I played games once upon a time (before Doom became THE game), and I enjoyed them. But I look at modern gaming and I see a cineplex full of slasher films. The only reason I "don't like games" (as you put it) is because the "games" medium has been Doomed.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
First, playing the flash version with a modern operating system means latency.
If you play DOOM in DOS on a fast machine like a pentium 200, the sound and graphics latency is very low. The only thing the machine is running is DOOM and the program writes directly to the sound and graphics drivers. This gives that immersion and connection with the game that is lost with even a few extra tens of milliseconds of latency.
It runs full screen all the time, and you cannot alt-tab out like a chicken. Under no circumstances should you have an online map open in your browser like the reviewer, and be breaking the immersion by flipping in and out of the game.
Second, the keyboard keys are the cursor arrows, ctrl, space and the keyboard side number keys. Not WASD. This means your right hand does the movement, and your left controls firing the gun, strafing, opening doors and selecting weapons.
Third, from the article :-
"Eventually I found the cheats, of course, and unlocked all the weapons."
How pathetic. Before even completing the first areas too. DOOM is fun when you build up your skills so you are running, spinning and blowing things up like a natural. It was meant to last a game player a good few months. If it's too hard, you are just not good enough yet.
IDKFA: cheater! you don't deserve weapons... IDDQD: trying to cheat eh? now you die! oh wrong game
life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think
I've found that going back to many classic FPS games is very disappointing because of monumental leaps made in the last 10-15 years. One exception for me is Half-Life. I enjoyed it just as much as Half-Life 2 which I had played first. Including the fact that it has one of the best final battles in any game.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I still have my original Doom shareware disks in the cardboard box. They're in my desk, next to a similarly-packaged copy of Rise of the Triad. I can't remember what else is in there but those small packages from Electronics Boutique way back when were some of the best money I've ever spent. Of course, I also have Ultimate Doom on CD, the Doom Level Editors Guide, D!Zone 150 and probably some other bits and pieces.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Maybe the reviewer could concentrate more on reviewing and less on literary masturbation, perhaps?
And I was going to post a deconstruction of the whole Doom metapsychological reference-view, especially its neoFreudian post-Marxist epistemological framework societal matrix, but then I found out that you can shoot the barrels and make them blow up.
To this day, (I'm 20 now) one of the clearest things I remember is 'IDDQD' and 'IDKFA'. This was some 10 years ago, but it has still managed to embed itself in my brain.
Doom was much more than just a precursor to modern FPS (a genre I've personally long abandoned).
It pushed the boundaries in gaming of graphics, audio, level design, and interactivity. It also helped excite a generation of game developers into joining the industry. Respect its authoritah.
I paid about $450 for my first cd burner, and it wasn't top of the line. The "good" blank CDs (Mitsui Gold) were about $3 each.
I was curious so I just checked...Mitsui Gold are still available, and they're still over $2 each.
The first time you hear that wha-THUMP, wha-THUMP, wha-THUMP, wha-THUMP, RRRROOOAAARRR! at 2 AM!
I had a Voodoo 3 2000 (16 MB ram!). I still have an orignal 3dfx mousepad.. one of those thin micro dot pads (secret tech back in those days).
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
FTA:
I chose Doom in my browser, programed in Flash with no music, but supporting the original WASD key commands for character movement.
Seriously, half the atmosphere of the game, especially in the opening scenes, came from the music!
ha! Skulltag!
Brad and I came up with that idea (he put it in practice) sitting around debating about Doom maps waaaaaaay back in the day. It's too bad the thing got hijacked from him a couple years back.
I can't believe I'm a small part of Doom nostalgia. Mom said I'd always amount to something!
-
They also tend to be able to crush people with their girth.
MMmm. The *default* was arrow keys and control. But If I'm not mistaken, the whole WASD began at that time, with Doom players
-- dnl
You were supposed to tell him to get off your lawn, weren't you? That's OK, I'm old too, I forget stuff these days as well.
Free Martian Whores!
This is doom2. Learn the proper no clipping cheat code: idspispopd
-- dnl
... had to look up maps online ...
He got that wrong, too. He posted a map image saying it was the first map. It's sad, but I actually recognized it wasn't the first map, and was able to remember that it was E1M3, without looking at the image URL. I recognized the hidden staircase that led you to the first Supercharge you could get.
I can't remember stuff for work, but that, *that* I remember.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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)
One reason Doom succeeded so well was that it did everything it needed extremely well, and left out anything it didn't need. So it was 3D enough to look cool, had enough lighting to make things spooky, but still ran relatively fast on the hardware available.
I'm not trying to dismiss UU -- clearly it was an achievement -- just point out that games are more than the sum of their parts.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Honey, is that you?