Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time 362
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.'"
Memories (Score:5, Insightful)
So by interesting, you mean... (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports and n (Score:3, Insightful)
needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports and not the dos box one.
mmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
The start and end of PC gaming as we know it (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Seriously? Makes you wait for the shotgun? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh....I think its time to take off the rose colored glasses. Doom looks pretty god awful compared to modern games. As soon as you get too close to a wall or enemy it just falls apart. Also objects don't rotate in 3d. Doom looks like a bunch of cardboard cutouts anymore. Quaint? Surely. But to say that something like Doom 3 or Half-Life is not superior then I think you must have a really funny idea about what constitutes good graphics. That said, I think there is certainly a place for straight-up 2d games, but Doom was really the bridge between the two at the time, and yes, I do realize that a lot of games came out earlier that also featured 2.5d and even 3d. I don't see any remote interest to revisit that sort of graphic style because it was basically an illusion that wore off quickly. Doom was pretty mindblowing....16 years ago. Or was it 18 years ago? Also its not resolution that needs to increase, but really rendering. When we can start to approach real-time ray tracing things are going to start looking a lot more natural and realistic because lighting will become far more accurate.
Re:Doom-shaped hole in my life? (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.
Re:So by interesting, you mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do we really need an informative Doom review?
Re:Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The start and end of PC gaming as we know it (Score:3, Insightful)
I hear ya, man. Rainbow Six? Doom clone. Red Orchestra? Doom clone. Portal? Doom clone!
It's so easy to dismiss a whole genre as non-innovating, particularly when you (by your own admission) haven't played any of the games that belong to it.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:4, Insightful)
It looked a lot like English, but that was the limit of its resemblance.
Re:needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports an (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not as bad as it looks (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.
Re:Memories (Score:1, Insightful)
The same could be said about movie reviewers who haven't even seen such classical silent films such as Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Roundhay Garden Scene or Battle of Chemulpo Bay. I mean, can you even comment modern movies if you haven't seen those?
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of Kotaku's articles don't even seem to have much to do with videogames. They cover practically everything *else* in their constant spamming of my daily news feed, though. They seem to insist on posting at least 50 stories a day and there really aren't 50 gaming stories to post, so they resort to things like "Someone makes a Mario Bros mushroom cupcake!". I eventually had to drop them from my news feed, because I spent more time marking hundreds of their posts as "read" than I did actually reading anything of theirs.
They're certainly not the most pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing faux-high-brow of the sites, though. They're more middle of the road. No, you can count on sites like Brainy Gamer and Bitmob for endless circle-jerks.
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly true. :D
These retarded n00bs don't understand that you're not a gamer until you mastered Asteroids, Defender, Qix, Xevious, Crush Roller and Joust. A multiplayer FPS like UT or Sauerbraten and 1 driving simulation as icing on the cake. The rest is scarcely relevant.
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:4, 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.
Re:Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:3, Insightful)
My fault I have a higher education than you and am the director of research for a multi-national corporation.
How long did it take you to compose that post in a legible manner? Everything I get at work from big-wigs who smugly assume (even when I'm the one paying for their services, e.g. when I go to the doctor) I'm an illiterate little shit who doesn't deserve the right to spend my hard-earned income on food is usually malformed garbage chock full of incomplete sentences, logical contradictions, and misused punctuation. The net effect over the past 4 years has made me conclude that there's really nothing involved skill-wise in being a CEO or director of sorts. You just need to know the right people in the old boys club. Besides, if you make a poor decision, you can just blame the answering service or get a bailout. No skill involved at all besides hypnotizing the masses that you're somehow better than them and somehow /deserve/ to get money for free.
I like big butts (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:hot review (Score:2, Insightful)
Not sure about the gay porn thing, but he definitely writes as though he's never held a REAL gun in his life - and he desperately wants to.
Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:1, Insightful)
its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy
Read this in a gay voice
No Sound!?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Doom-shaped hole in my life? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Doom-shaped hole in my life? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.