Slashdot Mirror


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.'"

31 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Plus, it's on Kotaku, the home of anime-obsessed nerds who love video games more than sex.

    I think I'll pass.

    1. Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 4, Funny

      Plus, it's on slashdot, the home of technology nerds who love computers more than sex.

      I think I'll pass.

      Nope, no different that way either. ah well.

      --
      "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
    2. Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by WitnessForTheOffense · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    3. Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by wilgibson · · Score: 4, Funny

      And it's being made fun of on Slashdot, the home of technology-obsessed nerds who love gadgets more than sex.

    4. Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by interkin3tic · · Score: 3, Funny

      And apparently -elitist- nerds. The most ridiculous type. It's like comic book guy from the simpsons making fun of millhouse.

    5. Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by pcolaman · · Score: 5, Funny

      You would know. Their 'waifu' are those stupid lolicon pillows.

      Doom? Is that supposed the old stupid game with the rickroll boom box?! and the blue tails runnin thru map01 firing shotguns since tails are foxes are the best, on the multiplayer geting a DOUBLE KILLS and role play with MAH BOIS etc.

      Doom's image has been tarnished plenty by these kinds of newbies these days. They no longer understand its contextual relevance and its significance.

      Captcha: mallard. Mallards are ducks. Ducks go quack. Quack is pretty close to "Quake".

      This is your brain on drugs. Get the picture?

    6. Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by JWSmythe · · Score: 3, Insightful

          It looked a lot like English, but that was the limit of its resemblance.

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
    7. Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. by MRe_nl · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Otherwise, you'll be stuck on this planet while the rest of us colonize space.

      "And we were sent off first," he concluded, and hummed a little bathing tune.

      --
      "Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
  2. Memories by vgbndkng · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Damn... I feel Old.

  3. 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.

    1. Re:It's not as bad as it looks by cosm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      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
    2. Re:It's not as bad as it looks by cosm · · Score: 5, Funny

      I didn't expect him to know the terminology. I was just boggled by the writing.

      Well I presume your average /.er's vernacular and phrase turning ability lies closer to the masterdebater end of the spectrum, rather than the cunning linguists range of word-play.

      --
      'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
    3. Re:It's not as bad as it looks by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:It's not as bad as it looks by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 3, Funny

      You, sir, are going down!

      --

      People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
    5. Re:It's not as bad as it looks by bertok · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I still prefer the looks of Doom to the looks of polygon-based games. I certainly preferred Doom to Quake, and maybe that has coloured my impressions of other games. "True" 3D graphics (made up of triangles) just look far too sharp for my liking. Edges on objects don't have chamfers, and the transition between objects and background is quite harsh. I figure those problems will be eventually resolved, but it needs better anti-aliasing and (possibly) "infinite" resolution.

      This is slowly getting resolved using some new techniques that effectively hide the "flatness" of the polygons. There are 3D accelerators now that can do proper tessellation and height maps at reasonable frame rates. Effectively, the triangles become similar in size to the pixels, so the detail becomes as good as what the monitor can display.

      The previous incarnation of this was variations on bump maps, which didn't really work all that well. The most advanced version is called parallax mapping, which is used by some games, but isn't as good as real detail geometry.

      Take a look at: Parallax mapping and this demo video of DX11 tessellation in action. In my opinion, they overdid it a bit in that video, but it gives you a good idea of the technology.

      After 'detail' becomes a non-issue for games, the next challenge will be more accurate lighting models, which are still hideously expensive to compute accurately. Similarly, animating a real looking (not just realistic) 3D human face is an extremely hard problem to solve, but I've seen some amazing strides made there as well.

  4. mmmmm by nomadic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. 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.

    2. Re:mmmmm by Floritard · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I remember buying Wolfenstein's shareware edition on a 5.25" disk from a grocery store (Albertsons?) and playing it on my 486 (or was it a 386?) with a Logitech Flightstick. I remember being utterly blown away by this PC game, as opposed to the now tame console games on which I had grown up.

      I remember some weeks later seeing tiny screenshots in early previews of id Software's next big thing "Doom" in a PC magazine in Walden Bookstores in the mall. I specifically remember seeing the shotgun and Imp enemy. Hell I remember the specific map, just not by name, pictured in that screenshot. I remember holding the shift key upon rebooting to play this incredible new game.

      Gaming, PC and console, has come a long way since then but few titles have captured that same kind of energy. As pretty as their games have been, I miss the id Software of my youth.

  5. 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
  6. Re:Doom-shaped hole in my life? by pieisgood · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  7. Nice by Danzigism · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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*
    1. Re:Nice by indiechild · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I always found Wolf3D to be repetitive and tedious, but Doom was genuinely creepy and fun to play. Just enough variety and surprises to keep you on your toes.

    2. Re:Nice by djrobxx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Nice by dunezone · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  8. hot review by alphatel · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy....to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world ...

    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.
  9. Whaaa Huh? by 3ryon · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  10. Re:Doom-shaped hole in my life? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  11. 17 years? OMG!!! by naoursla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. 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.

  12. Re:Here, let me summarize... by Martian_Kyo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Are summarizing sex or doom?

    Sex...it's like doom.

    Bonus 'joke':
    It's been 17 years since I enjoyed either.

  13. I'm A New Doom Player Too!! by BigBlueOx · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.