What’s everyone’s favorite DOOM game? Favorite version? Favorite mods? Personally, I run DOOM 1 & 2 through Doomsday or GZDoom for the added freelook. It just makes the games that much more fun, imo.
“Mercenaries DOOM”
“Brutal DOOM”
“Ultimate Super Doom 3”
This doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the random DOOM mods out there. :tup:
I streamed some random DOOM sessions on my twitch channel in my sig. I’ll try to stream some original DOOM later on today for the anniversary, too.
^ Never forget the drop-off of quality level and game design compared to most modern FPS games for scrubs.
^ DOOM E1M1 theme on eight…floppy drives?
“Post mortem” With John Romero and Tom Hall. This video is very interesting and these guys had more to do with the actual game development of DOOM 1 and 2 than Carmack did(Carmack was always mainly just the engine/tech guy) and John and Tom went on to have a hand in other amazing FPS games at 3D realms with games like Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D. Tom Hall and John were the guys behind the original Deus EX and game Arnachronox. I’m not sure if they had a hand in Shadow Warrior or not(I think they left 3D Realms shortly after Duke, to create Ion Storm.)
Doom 3 got a crazy texture mod a year or two ago, I snagged it and it makes it look better than the DOOM 3: BFG edition re-release(which looks worse than vanilla PC Doom 3) but with this mod, it straight up looks better than most modern games in raw texture detail.
Why, though? Gameplay was 99.9% the same. Level design was still good. dissa commenta makea noa sensa.
I thought it was convoluted with the teleporting and whatnot. It was quite similar, but I found that I greatly preferred the first game. None of the marginal changes were for the better.
I liked the teleporting mechanic, especially when monsters would walk into the teleporter trying to chase you down, teleporting them to your new location you just teleported to. I thought that was crazy interesting at the time, same with enemies fighting each other if they shot or hit each other with an attack trying to get to you. Crazy that 20 years later, the original DOOM is still as fun, interactive and deep as it is.
I find the downtime after shooting off the Double-Barrelled Shotgun really sucked if you were surrounded by a group of enemies. It’s ideal for a small group since it could kill more than 1 enemy at a time depending on how you placed your shot/what enemy type you were fighting against, but overall, I prefer the original shotgun most of the time and I find myself using it more than the Double-Barrelled Shotgun.
I vividly remember the first time I saw Doom. Went to my friends house as a kid and his dad was jamming on it. When he pulled out the chainsaw I was practically frothing at the mouth. Must play!!
“Club DOOM” Only on the PSX port of DOOM 1(though there’s a mod that turns PC DOOM 1 into PSX DOOM.)
Pretty cool, I think the Saturn release of DOOM had some extra stuff not seen in other versions too. Same thing with Duke Nukem: 3D, in the N64 port, you could dual-whield guns Shadow Warrior style.
First online death match for me was with Doom 2 with “Death Match” add on cd back in 1996. Could only play with my friend on phone line connection, and 75% of the time, couldn’t get it to work. It had a Beavis and Butthead mod where each time you shot you’d hear one of them do the laugh, and when you killed a monster you’d hear something like this:
That Doom Mercenaries looks very tasty, might have to get that later today.
Anywho, first played Doom on the 32X and loved it. Rented the SNES version and it sucked. Largely because it was slow and pixely and no passwords and no saves which is nuts when you think how long Doom is. Finally got a 32X for Xmas and the add-on was dead at this point so it only cost $20 but my parents could not find Doom on 32X, so my dad got it from a pawn shop. Problem is that the game would work whenever it wanted to. Me and my dad tried everything, we cleaned that cartridge from top to bottom and one time it worked and I managed to beat the game and it never worked again afterwards. No other 32X games were worth a damn to me at the time and I kinda’ moved on.
Bought Doom 2 for Windows 95 and it would not run. Again, me and my dad tried for several hours to get this game to work and it just wouldn’t go. Only thing I could do is listen to a midi file and just stare at the box the game came in. Keep in mind I bought the game for I think $40 and with PC software you cannot return it. Flash forward a few years later where we upgraded to Windows 98 and I found the Doom 2 disc and decided to give it another chance and eureka! It worked! Played the shit out of it but never legit beat it back then without the use of cheats.
Also played Doom 64 but the archaic nature of the Doom engine -such as the lack of jumping, ducking, aiming- really turned me off at the time and I never bothered to finish it. Somewhat recently I returned to Doom 64 via a mod and it’s damn good and what Doom 3 should have been. For the record, I thought Doom 3 was okay but should have been better.
Since we didn’t get a PC in the house till ~1999, my first experience with Doom was the SNES version. It was extremely technically limited, but still pretty fun and it’s impressive they managed to cram it onto that cart as functionally as they did. The music also sounds much better on SNES than the MS Midi you get in the PC version out of most soundcards.
Doom 64 was severely under-rated. People complained about its use of sprites, but since 3D models at that time were at Lego Man standards, the new high-res sprites achieved a much more realistic look than the alternatives. Combined with the awesome ambient soundtrack, it had a really solid scifi/horror atmosphere to it, and ran really smooth. The only real flaw was the lack of multiplayer. The Doom 64 Absolution port for PC, and later Doom 64 Ex, continued to be fun long after the N64 era ended.
All the various source ports which have come out for PC Doom have been really great. Playing with one of the various HD texture packs, Doom 64 sprites, the PS1 soundtracks, or remixed MP3 versions of the original songs, complete mouselook, and the fast monsters option, has kept the game fun over the years. I always thought the add-on character/weapon models were really horrible though, which is why I stuck to the sprites.
Brutal Doom is definitely the best version of Doom today, and the main thing which has made me drop the Doomsday sourceport and go back to Zdoom-based ports. Stuff like the reworked minigun, select-fire assault rifle, and reloading, enhance the roles originally intended for those weapons and keep the combat up to date without betraying the original spirit of the gameplay. Brutal Doom’s AI is a big improvement too - suffering a spontaneous fatality from an imp who silently crept up on you out of nowhere while checking the map in an area you thought you cleared out really makes you think twice.
I didn’t totally hate Doom 3, but it strayed way too far from the original’s fast-paced gameplay. Going for a System Shock atmosphere is fine as long as you don’t limit every room in the game to 10ft wide and every enemy encounter to just 2-3 monsters…which is what they did. The weapons really were not up to snuff either…the machinegun was ripped straight from Q3 and didn’t feel enough like a real assault rifle, the chaingun lacked the monstrous rate of fire it’s known for, and the shotgun’s pathetically wide spread was a far cry from it’s versatile Doom 1 predecessor.
Like I said in the PC thread, I don’t expect much from Doom 4, but I still hold hopes that this long-delayed Doom 3 mod will bring original Doom gameplay to a modern(ish) engine.
In the mean time, it’s worth mentioning that in addition to providing a bunch of modern HD effects, Sikkmod for Doom 3 has an option to spawn additional monsters randomly around the levels. A good chunk of them wind up spawning somewhere outside the level, in the walls, so you don’t get to fight them, but a lot of them still spawn IN the level so it still rachets up the action of Doom 3 and brings it closer to the frenzied feel of the original games.
I also created a small mod for Sikkmod that makes the weapons function closer to their Brutal Doom counterparts - tight shotgun spread, select fire AR-style machinegun, insane chaingun rate of fire, fully semi-auto pistol with recoil, and higher headshot damage overall. Maybe I should dig it off my HDD and post it one of these days.
On the subject of doom 2 not being as good as the original, I’ll have to agree. The level design in much of the later levels of doom two were very questionable, especially the city levels.
Excellent article by one of the lead designers of Bioshock 2, Jean-Paul LeBrenton, explaining how Doom was inspired by arcade classics and why it still holds up surprisingly well compared to today’s shooters: http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74
And yet more articles praising Doom’s excellent monster and weapon design while also criticizing Brutal Doom, alongside some wad reccomendations:
The shareware episode of Doom 1 is still the best. I honestly can’t enjoy the rest of doom, or doom2 for that matter, although the double shotgun is an awesome weapon.
I also haven’t truly beaten Doom 3 yet. That’s going to happen though.
He does a good job of covering both the pros and cons of Brutal Doom. What makes Brutal Doom so good is its enhanced weapon functionality and enemy AI. The gore effects shown off in its trailers are a humorous nod to the “rip and tear” one-off comic and to oldschool FPS culture, but they’re also totally gratuitous and silly.
The good thing is I don’t think you have to let Brutal Doom’s dumber points drag the game down if you don’t want to. As long as you just refrain from using extraneous features like the curb stomps and other fatalities, you can pretty much just play Brutal Doom as a weapon/AI upgrade with only the occasional exaggerated blood spatter to tell you otherwise.
I heart Doom. Grew up playing it with my friend down the street. I remember how his mom would take away the modem cord when she angrily found out we were blocking the phone line death matching each other. Little did she know, a regular curly phone cord worked the same.
Still needs a little work, but this is my tribute to the game that started a love affair with fps:
