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First Person Shooters (Games) Games

Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time 362

Posted by Soulskill from the new-is-relative dept.
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.'"
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Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time More

Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time

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  • Sounds pseudo-intellectual to me. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 09, 2010 @09:45PM (#33199420)

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

    I think I'll pass.

  • Memories (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vgbndkng ( 1806628 ) on Monday August 09, 2010 @09:47PM (#33199444)
    Damn... I feel Old.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pspahn ( 1175617 )
      The sheer joy of playing Doom over a 14.4k on Kali (is my $20 lifetime subscription still valid???) Back when all you had to do was set up control for mouse look and you would rule.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by RulerOf ( 975607 )
        Ah, the old BBS days.... One of the guys on the BBS I was a member of back then (via "Mom can I have a subscription to this BBS for my birthday?" X-D) used to make maps with custom sound tracks taken from NIN CD's he had laying around. And the first time I finally got Doom up and running via Telix (I think?), thinking it was especially neat that I was running more than one program at a time, everything loaded and I had a hell of a time trying to move. The lag was unbearable. So we get out of the game an

  • So by interesting, you mean... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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!

  • It's not as bad as it looks (Score:4, Informative)

    by pathological liar ( 659969 ) on Monday August 09, 2010 @09:50PM (#33199468)

    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.

    • Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cosm ( 1072588 ) <thecosm3@@@gmail...com> on Monday August 09, 2010 @10:14PM (#33199696)

      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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gringer ( 252588 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ZosX ( 517789 )

        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, b

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by cgenman ( 325138 )

          There is a weird thing where the mind tends to put experiences in tiers. If everything is a cardboard cutout, it will all flow together and work OK. You did "cardboard cutout" well. The moment you start mingling real 3D objects in there, the brain starts seeing 3D objects and poorly rendered 3D objects (those aforementioned cutouts).

          The same can be said of poorly done bump or normal maps, poorly digitized textures, etc. If something is either really good, or intentionally missing, the mind tends to give

        • Well, I was pretty amazed by the update that the guys over at doomsday gave the engine, but you're point is dead on. While those games are still a lot of fun, the graphics suck. That being said, they still make me jump out of my skin in places, but that was because they really draw you in for cheap frights.

        • Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sjames ( 1099 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @01:31AM (#33200880) Homepage Journal

          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: (Score:2)

        by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
        You realize we aren't all playing Quake 2 anymore, right? You might want to look at modern games before passing a judgment like that because it boggles my mind how you can find the muddy, dated graphics of Doom better than Crysis, Rage, Uncharted or others. It was a revolution back in its day but times change.

      • Re:It's not as bad as it looks (Score:4, Interesting)

        by bertok ( 226922 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @03:57AM (#33201410)

        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 [wikipedia.org] and this demo video [youtube.com] 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eln ( 21727 )
      I applaud you for wading through that. The summary was so unreadable I didn't think I could click the link without losing my sanity in a dense forest of unnecessary prose. This thing is written by someone who is far more impressed with his own writing than anyone else will ever be.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by c0lo ( 1497653 )
      Especially the final:

      I enjoyed the game more than I thought I would. I had expected a dinosaur, something that felt outmoded and unevolved. Instead, I found a cave-painting, gorgeous in its primitive beauty and built with an intelligence that rendered mean conflict with a thrill it is hard to ignore — or forget.

      So it was... so still is.

    • No Sound!?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cyclomedia ( 882859 )

      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.

  • needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports and n (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Joe The Dragon ( 967727 ) on Monday August 09, 2010 @09:52PM (#33199482)

    needs to try windoom or zdoom or other ports and not the dos box one.

    • 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.

  • mmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld.gmail@com> on Monday August 09, 2010 @09:53PM (#33199508) Homepage
    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.
    • Rise of the Triad and Heretic were awesome; both added different things (ROT added climbing and IIRC walls which moved diagonally; Heretic added more z-axis action and what seemed to be smarter AI).
    • the original doom was such a fantastic game, but i was too young and found doom 2 first at the price of 50$, if i remember, which was a great game too even if it didn't add all that much to the original doom. and at the time there was all this parental hype about how the pixelated violence would cause kids to become psychopaths, the world would end, blah blah blah (seems to happen quite often actually).

      i have to say i had a similar gaming epiphany (if you can call it that) when the original quake came ou
    • Yeah, I remember when I made the "upgrade" from Wolf3d to Doom...it was a legend. As much as I love the more recent FPS titles...I am not scared to go back to a little doom, Quake II, or even Duke Nukem Atomic Edition. Its like junk food for the brain.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 )

      You were on AOL in 1993? YOU KILLED THE INTERNET, YOU ASSHOLE!

      Caps lock filter bypass text.

    • Re:mmmmm (Score:4, Informative)

      by crwl ( 802043 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @12:03AM (#33200448)
      Did you ever try Ultima Underworld? [wikipedia.org] 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.

    • 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.

      Well, the major difference was atmosphere - they dropped the goofball stufff from Wolf and went to 2.5D.

      But still - there was nothing like seeing a 3D game for the first time. I still remember the first time I saw Wolf on a demo computer at Wallyworld. I'd never heard of it before, didn't even know 3D games existed, and I started drooling. It made Prince of Persia look like a piece of

    • Re:mmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Floritard ( 1058660 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @03:05AM (#33201216)
      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.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ZosX ( 517789 )

      If you think doom was ugly you should play wolf3d. We've come a long way. Of course doom was written by a handful of guys, nowadays you need a dedicated team just to work on your engine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cgenman ( 325138 )

        If you think Wolfenstein 3D is ugly, you should play Chex [youtube.com] Quest [youtube.com]. Yes, those are "evil cereal eating creatures from another dimension."

      • Or the Catacombs Abyss, or Lethal Tender for that matter. Lethal tender was a pretty interesting game in that it allowed you to do things which I can't recall any other game allowing you to do at the time. Strip the guards for a uniform, get injured in a limb and end up running in circles if you didn't heal. Actually go outside (Well sort of)

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by w0mprat ( 1317953 )
      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by morari ( 1080535 )

      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.

  • Nice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Danzigism ( 881294 ) on Monday August 09, 2010 @10:27PM (#33199802)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Push Latency ( 930039 )
      You got it! I've heard myself painting that exact scenario for younger gamers. Those late-night sessions were some of the most impressionably freaky moments of my life!

    • Re:Nice (Score:5, Interesting)

      by indiechild ( 541156 ) on Monday August 09, 2010 @11:28PM (#33200242)

      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.

    • I think the most challenging task in gaming at the time for me was convincing my parents that their multi-thousand dollar 486 needed a $300 sound card so their son could play Wing Commander 2 with the voice acting in its full glory (with the extra add-on pack, naturally). That will beat the snot out of taking any uber-demon on with a shotgun.

    • Re:Nice (Score:4, Insightful)

      by djrobxx ( 1095215 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @12:20AM (#33200522)
      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.

    • Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dunezone ( 899268 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @12:38AM (#33200616) Journal
      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by bronney ( 638318 )

      Just wait till you see Doom 2. 7x 720k floppy disks? No game after Doom come close in making a truly awesome rocket launcher, imo.

  • obviously a pussy (Score:2, Troll)

    by smash ( 1351 )

    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...

    • That's there on all difficulties. He just missed it. I also never played with the mouse, I didn't feel there was a whole lot of point as Doom wasn't exactly a game of precision aiming.
      • Indeed, prior to Quake, there wasn't really any reason to use a mouse to play. I recall playing Wolf3D and using the chain gun for twofers because of the way the aiming worked. Most of the time you didn't have to precisely hit them, even across the room. Same for Doom, the shotgun was great for being able to mow down several low level enemies at once without carefully aiming.

  • The start and end of PC gaming as we know it (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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 St

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sunami ( 751539 )

      So you never played Tribes, eh?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rjhubs ( 929158 )
        Tribes, a great game, a bit ahead of its time and probably the first well made team oriented game. But it seems to be lost in the history of team games, where all you hear about is Counter Strike and Battlefield

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pspahn ( 1175617 )
          I wonder if I'm alone here. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point all these WWII shooters started coming out, and they all had similar names. I really have no idea what any of them are.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Draek ( 916851 )

      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.

  • 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,

  • hot review (Score:3, Funny)

    by alphatel ( 1450715 ) * on Monday August 09, 2010 @10:39PM (#33199886)

    ...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?

  • 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 comp

  • Doom dreams (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MrDoh! ( 71235 ) on Monday August 09, 2010 @10:44PM (#33199928) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • 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)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Plekto ( 1018050 )

      Another great old game to play is/are the X-Wing games. With a little tweaking, you can run them in Windows. It's perhaps the first full-featured 3D space combat simulator(yes, I know about Elite and older stuff, but for Windows, this was pretty much the best of the lot in the DOS days). Tie Fighter was the best, IMO, since you could customize your load-out and it supported high resolution graphics.

      And it was hard. It really felt like an accomplishment when you finally finished the entire game. Not 10

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pspahn ( 1175617 )
        I would like to find an old copy of SVGA Harrier. Most underrated game of all time. Combat flight sim with an RTS infused. Wow that game was hot.

  • Whaaa Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 3ryon ( 415000 ) on Monday August 09, 2010 @10:46PM (#33199942)

    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.

  • News Flash! Gamer plays a game! Water is wet! Richard Simmons is gay! The sky is blue!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I had to double check the link to make sure I wasn't reading The Onion:

    I could close my eyes and see Doom play out. In my mental port of Doom, the game was all grays and browns, with red highlights of violence. There was no blue. Wrong. There is blue.

    The blue surprise may seem trifling, but it gave me the sensation that my assumptions were wrong. It ensured that, for however long I played, I was likely to discover that, in other ways, Doom had more to offer than I had expected.

    Ugh.

  • 17 years? OMG!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by naoursla ( 99850 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @12:59AM (#33200720) Homepage Journal

    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 [drdteam.org], 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 Quak

  • I'm A New Doom Player Too!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by BigBlueOx ( 1201587 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @09:44AM (#33204260)
    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.

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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