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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.
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
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*
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 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
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.
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.