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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.
as you type this from your mom's basement wondering what it would be like to have a girlfriend......
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
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.
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*
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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?
I chose Doom in my browser, programed in Flash with no music, but supporting the original WASD key commands for character movement.
I'm not entirely sure how you can truly enjoy Doom without the music. Hell, I know for a fact that I at least have the infamous E1M1 background track on my MP3 player.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Are summarizing sex or doom?
Sex...it's like doom.
Bonus 'joke':
It's been 17 years since I enjoyed either.
You can get back to the 50% score if you look at it as:
news [ ]
for nerds [x]
stuff [x]
that matters [ ]
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
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.
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/
You mean GZdoom, not Zdoom - G is the one with 3d acceleration and OpenGL stuff.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
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.