This game appears so underwhelming on the surface compared to today's shooters.
To a casual onlooker now, Doom just looks like a cute little retro game about shooting demons in the face. Something like COD will have exploding buildings, terrorists running around and shooting and shouting, professional voice acting and marketing, and everything else that sells a game in today's market. Doom doesn't have any of it. I knew about Battlefield's destruction, COD's guns and skins and kill streaks, Halo's aliens and battle rifles, and Counter-Strike's tense rounds before I even started playing these games.
However, they were always juuust out of my reach. I lacked a powerful computer to play most of these on PC. I had access to an Xbox 360, but playing online with other people costed $60 a year, an expense I perhaps could have convinced a family member to spare me of but that just wouldn't abide by me. My family also had a PS3 with COD, but I never bothered in any multiplayer matches for some reason. I knew that even the few times I got into a game that I wasn't any good, whether on my older brother's PC playing Battlefield and dying over and over again in a match after running a while and not knowing where to go, or at a friends house where said friend had an Xbox 360 with all the CODs and all the Xbox Live and basically everything. So, I stuck to Roblox, Garry's Mod, and others, where I was in practice, I could access the games, and I actually was a little bit good, and I knew what was going on.
I remember when I first bought Doom. I've got a confession to make: I'm not a boomer, and I'm not even a millenial. Born in 2001, I grew up with Halo, Garry's Mod, Call of Duty, and all sorts of other modern shooters that I enjoyed at the time. I enjoyed those games, although I was never all that good at the time, and I always felt something was missing, that something would never change about shooters. I kept thinking about adding more mechanics, better graphics, more guns, or maybe an even crazier plot line would make something like COD better. How foolish.
I looked to the past because, having played Garry's Mod, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about with the source material for that game, so I bought Half-Life 2 with some spare christmas money. Half-Life 2 didn't hold my interest for very long periods of time, and I ended up beating the game over several months on a slow burn of picking it up and playing it maybe every once in a while, but being fun and unique, I bought Half-Life 1, and that game was some how more appealing, not less, despite the increased age compared to Half-Life 2. I could talk about why, but that's a different article to be written a different day.
I looked to the past because I thought it was cheeky. "OK", I thought, "Half-Life was the first FPS that pulled FPSes out of the caves, and I sort of liked it, so let's buy Doom 1 for the nerd cred and for seeing what a silly cute little place those caves were, with the old age and the silliness and, well . . . whatever it is that these fancy COD games offer that this one won't have. Hey, it's only $5 on Steam, sounds like a fun little weekend romp or something."
How foolish. How uneducated. How uncultured. How naive. I was about to be annihalated and reincarnated by this monster of a game, and I had no idea at all.
I began in the hangar on the original Doom executable running inside Dosbox via Steam, on Hurt Me Plenty difficulty. I recognized this room from when I saw a video about Doom from a while ago online. Thankfully, this secretive insider knowledge to a seemingly lost time meant I wasn't such a heathen that I couldn't find my way around Phobos; I knew where a few of the monsters were, I knew I could shoot up without aiming up, and I knew where the first shotgun was. That shotgun was all I needed. I knew little of it's power, I just knew I needed something a little bigger than my sidearm to deal with the imps.
Of course, as I proceeded further and further, my little preliminary knowledge of Doom began to fail me as I beat the second level and found the third completely unfamiliar to me, since I had only ever seen playthroughs or videos up to level 2. I crept slowly around corners, even in these slightly familiar levels. I had not yet discovered auto run, and I grappled with the fights between me and these foreign hostiles. In COD, they just took cover, shot at you a while, and behaved the same. Here, they basically had squads. The zombies hurled bullets and shotgun pellets through the air to make you not alive immediately, the imps scheduled your not-aliven-ing for later via fireball scheduling technology, and the pinkies ran towards you and blocked shots to prevent you from making the demons not alive, all while their jaw strength and mighty teeth did the work of rendering you not alive up close. It was a ferocious combo of enemies that was not fully revealed to me until later in the game, as Hurt Me Plenty difficulty eases up the introduction of new enemy types, and as a result, I was always on my toes, not always knowing how to deal with the enemies that laid before me. Each level was not a window dressing for generic baddies and shootouts, but an increasingly massive and sprawling maze, a long winded and confusing and hostile endeavor, a labyrinth of death via demonic mauling, an elaborate evisceration chamber. Weapons and ammo and supplies actually had to be scavenged instead of taken for granted, enemy encounters had to be carefully thought out, and it made for a tense and unfamiliar experience, a real challenge for the first time in a while that actually had horror elements too, a challenge magnitudes more fresh than hiding behind a box to wipe some ketchup off of my face after shooting some russians, a task that required more attentiveness and care than hitting F to pay respects and using an aim assist to tap on heads and using one gun with a zillion attachments to mow down every enemy in the game without issue, a trial by circle strafing and powerup hunting. It was demonic and hellish, an alien nightmare of enemies I had never faced in a videogame before, a wakeup call to what a real challenge was. But, despite the adversity, despite all the traps and now-predictable monster closets I waltzed into, despite all the acid pits I slipped and slid into with Doom's slidy movement and odd controls with the mouse movement (Remember, I was playing the Steam release. WASD to move and mouse to look, sure, but moving the mouse up and down moved Doomguy back and forth, a feature turned nightmare as I stood too close to ledges while turning to face a demon and moved the mouse too far up or down in the process...), and despite the low resolution that made picking out distant demons a little tricky, I got good. I learned which weapons to use for what situations, my reactions to the demons improved over time, I began moving faster in combat to dodge projectiles, I could figure out how to maneuver through a room to survive a bad situation, I was able to hunt down and discover some secret areas in acid pools and behind oddly textured walls, and I eventually triumphed over the two Barons of hell . . .
. . . only for the real game to begin on the other side of the teleporter they were guarding.
And when the first fourth of the original Doom was over, I realized I had more fun with a shooter than I ever had before, and yet it was only the beginning. The feeling I had at the end of Half-Life, I had at the end of one out of four chapters of Doom.
And that was before the tinkering even began.
I did a bit of googling on how to run Doom better in "current year". "It's a retro game," I figured to myself, "I gotta put some work in to make it run like it's supposed to with good performance and no mouse movement controlling Doom guy's movement." That's when I found that Doom was made open source not too long after Quake's release. I could run a version of the Doom executable modified by the community, called a "source port", such as Chocolate Doom, that was the exact same as the original game, except it worked on modern OSes, including Windows, Mac, and Linux, meaning the "Windows Only" banner next to the game on Steam was a lie. I could put this game on my Linux PC, I could configure the controls to my liking with an easy to use program for Chocolate Doom, I could run the game on a little Single Board Computer I got flawlessly, I could play simple custom maps, I could even make my own, and it was as simple as drawing some lines on paper. Or, I could upgrade to Zdoom or Zandronum, and get full 3D support, better performance, modern mods, multiplayer with a bustling community in both co-op and deathmatch modes, and all of this was completely free (well, except for the $5 I paid for Doom itself).
I felt blown away by what I had seen, like it had never been done before, like I was finally experiencing the long-prophecized "next-gen" of gaming, like I had found the next big thing. Only, it wasn't the next big thing, it was the last. Doom's technology and graphics were antiquated, and couldn't hold a candle to even Half Life, let alone Battlefield or Call of Duty, yet it felt new, revolutionary, fresh, and exciting. It was here I learned that I cared more about a good game than good graphics, that a whole library of amazing games I've never played before laid underneath my feet if I stopped drip feeding myself with what few new games I could get, and I learned that there was a whole world of unique ahd challenging games that were waiting for me if I looked around for them and explored, instead of mindlessly droning through the latest titles. I learned that I could build a cutting-edge gaming PC for hundreds of dollars and spend $60 a year plus whatever the DLC costed for a mediocre experience, or I could spend $5 on a game that really got me going before I even made it through a quarter of the game and I could play it however I wanted, with not just the stellar base game to play through, but all sorts of amazing community content available for free. This was what truly motivated me to try more and more old games and indie games, that there was always something top-notch waiting for me if I kept my eyes and mind open to whatever I saw on Steam.
While I believe one of the best ways to experience a great game is to have no idea what you're stepping into in some ways, older games like Doom can use just a tidbit of explanation. Doom is a First-Person Shooter released in 1993 that takes place in the far-off, futuristic year of 2018. We have space marines and scientists on Mars doing teleportation experiments. You're playing as a marine who was sent there as punishment for disobeying an order to shoot at civilians, instead having opted to punch your commanding officer. One day, you and your squad receive a distress call from the scientists at Phobos, one of the two moons orbiting Mars. Something evil is emerging from their teleporters, and Deimos, the other Mars moon, disappeared from orbit altogether. As the only combat-ready squad on the red planet, you and your squad high-tail it to Phobos. Stuck on lookout duty near the ship you showed up on, you hear your squad mates being slaughtered by a variety of demons over the radio. You're inevitably the last one alive, you can't pilot the ship back to Mars, and there's only one way out of this situation: through the demon-filled Mars base.
And that's how the game begins. It starts in the mars hangar follows you as you make your way through the Phobos base to the teleporter complex. Between each episode of the game, there's a text intermission screen that explains the story up to this point and basically serves as a simple low-tech alternative to a cutscene or scripted sequence. It works to get the story across and it gives you a little something to look forward to after each episode. The settings of each level also tell their own story; you find dead marines and some dead civilians, demonic artifacts, flesh spires, and all sorts of evidence of things the scientists were messing with that they really shouldn't have, including torches and candles lit and distributed around the mars bases and levels like candy.
The game itself is reasonably simple, but very good. You make your way through each level, picking up weapons, ammo, supplies, and the occasional powerup along the way, and you shoot demons while avoiding their attacks. The weapons are distinct, powerful, and varied, yet simple to use, and they escalate in power very well. The enemies are also fairly varied, the levels are intricate and fairly open in that you can explore whatever direction you want, with no invisible walls or arbitrary barriers to hold you back from wherever you want to go. It's a simple idea, but it's surprisingly unique when newer games have strayed so far from it, and the game is able to use it's own very simple rules to create a very wide variety of situations and fights. This is a major part of why the game persists even to today.
What used to be a foreign land is now my second home. I'm practically a Doom veteran now. I've played through much of the original on Ultra Violence difficulty, I've played through a bit of Doom 2 on Ultra Violence as well, and one of the first things I do when setting up a new OS install on whatever computer I'm setting up is to install Doom on it. I'm intimately familiar with the circle strafe, I know not only how to dance with each monster in a fight and dodge their shots while hitting mine, but also what's the best gun to kill them before the fight even starts. I know how to control crowds of different enemies, how to conserve my ammo and how to make the most of my items or armor laying around, how to navigate the mazes of levels, how to set up whatever source port I like, how to play multiplayer, etc. I know the memes, I've played Doom 2, maybe the first third of Doom 3 and 2016, and I would consider myself a reasonably familiar and sort of good Doom player. I'm familiar with this game, and if I were even remotely this familiar with a game like COD or Battlefield, I probably would have moved on.
So, why am I still playing Doom?
Because it's eternal.
Well, I guess I could give a more objective review about the game rather than my life story with it, and that would probably convince you better.
You have to keep moving in order to survive. You can spend the first few levels slowly clearing corners with your shotgun like I did when I was just starting out, but Doom has a way of forcing you into more and more open areas over time, and you learn to play it less like a tactical shooter and more like Doom over time. You learn to run, you learn to dodge bullets and fireballs, you learn to kite enemies into more favourable positions, you learn which weapons are best for what situation, etc. The default game is a reasonable challenge, although if it's not enough for you, there's Plutonia. There's always Plutonia.
Zombies shoot at you, imps throw slow but powerful fire balls, pinkies run at you. It's a simple system, but you're forced to prioritize targets and to use the right tool for the job. Hell, the monsters can even get mad at each other and fight each other if you lead them into each other's line of fire.
COD has a myriad of 40 assault rifles that look different but function the same. Meanwhile, Doom has only 8 weapons, yet covers a wider range of weapon functions than COD because only two serve a similar role (the Chaingun and the Plasma gun), and even then they're still really not quite the same. Plus, they chew through ammo and the chaingun might take a longer time to kill than a good shotgun blast, so you don't use them all the time like in other games. Meanwhile, you have shotguns and rocket launchers and fists and BFGs in between that serve all kinds of fancy and unique roles. Doom 2 introduces the super shotgun, and things get even better with it because that gun is very, very powerful.
The levels expand into mazes, and you have to figure out yourself where to go and how to navigate the level. It's not a linear romp where you go down what is essentially a really fancy corridor while a commander shouts orders at you, or a slightly windy corridor where you hop on your iPad mid way through to call in an airstrike. It's just you and the demons, and you're left entirely to your own devices. You could argue that this is actually a shortcoming of Doom since it punctuates the shooting with getting lost in a maze full of dead demons where you don't know where you are or where you're going, but it's still a very relieving freedom if your prior experience with level design in games is all linear. You explore at your own pace, and you set your own rules. There's even a detailed map of your area you can bring up by hitting tab, and you can move the camera around, or you can place markers around the map to mark areas of interest or landmarks.
It's not just the design of the levels, though, it's the appearance, too. There's a clear color pallete, the textures used for walls and floors and ceilings are very appropriate for each level, and the game has a distinct theme that starts out in sci fi tech base land and works over to hell as you get further and further through the game until you reach the first mission of the third episode, where the floor is made of literal flesh and you start the level ascending a flesh elevator. Just because the graphics are crunchy and old doesn't mean the game lacks a competent and coherent art direction. The technology has aged, but the game still looks great in it's own way, and the levels really do feel like their own surreal and hellish settings.
Doom's soundtrack is surprisingly punchy and catchy for something restricted to the noises that early 90's PCs could make. Just make sure you're using a source port that supports the Midi tracks as god intended. The PC speaker stuff is fine, but you're missing out if you don't give Doom's soundtrack a listen in real-deal Midi. The tracks might not be as heavy or industrial as Doom 2016's tracks or heaped with as many awards, but they're perfect for making your way through the mazes and killing demons at your own pace. They build necessary tension while also being awesome, and there's a surprising amount of variety on display, from rocky metal to suspenseful orchestra pieces.
Here's one of my favorite tracks.
There's Doomworld, where all the forums and mods and maps for Doom are, as well as the Id Archive. There's communities for this game on literally every social media site, from Twitter to Reddit to whatever. There's youtubers like Decino and ICARUSLIVES and CIVVIE11 who make videos about Doom (among other videos) ranging from humerous to informative to just impressive. You can download the Zandronum source port to get a crazy fun Doom multiplayer experience on all sorts of fun public servers. The community isn't always the biggest, but it's the most reliable and dependable. This is especially noteworthy when you consider all the big name games that only survive a year before the sequel rolls around and kills the game.
Doom and Doom 2 each cost $5 on Steam and GoG. You can run these games on any potato running Windows, MacOS, or Linux, there's a source port for nearly any situation or desire, and even the more modern mods aren't out of your grasp if you're not running the best computer. It's fun that nearly anyone can have, and it's just ready for the taking.
You can download Doom online by buying it off of either Steam or Gog.com for $5. I would recommend Gog even though I used Steam, since I never actually play Doom through Steam and I always use a source port to do it.
In case you got here and missed the description earlier, Doom's source code was released under an open source license after Id software (the guys behind Doom) made Quake. So, the community has been releasing their own modified versions of the Doom engine that can be used to play through Doom. Some stick mostly to the original, like Chocolate Doom did, with the exception of adding in a better configuration program and more settings for things like the control scheme and modern OS support so that you don't have to run the game inside of Dosbox. Others, like GZDoom, add real 3D rendering support, free mouselook on the y axis, jumping, modern mod support, modern multiplayer support, and more.
Personally, I used Chocolate Doom to play through Doom the first time around, and I would recommend it to most people. Just note that Chocolate Doom renders Doom at it's original resolution of 320 by 200 and runs at 35 frames a second. I was totally happy with it, but I can understand that some people will want a higher framerate and resolution, which is why I also think you should take a look at Crispy Doom. It's Chocolate Doom, but with a higher frame rate and better rendering and a few other "crispy options".
I don't recommend GZDoom for a first time playthrough, because it adds in too many features that stray too far from what was intended, such as jumping, looking up and down, full stealth with the partial invisibility powerup instead of partial stealth, etc. You can disable these, but I'm not sure where or how, or if there's one convenient option for it or if you have to go hunting for each one in the massive behemoth of a settings menu that GZDoom has. I do recommend GZDoom if you ever want to try some cool mods, though, since it adds lots of features to the Doom engine and increases a lot of limits that make modern mods possible.
So, here's how you run Doom in a source port:
You may also want to look up how to get Midi music working in your source port of choice. If your source port uses texture filtering of any kind, shut it off, because it makes the textures look blurry, including those of the enemies, and it's just awful for a game like Doom where everything is a pixelated 2D texture.
Oh, and one last thing. This is sort of random, but it's important. The effects of the Berzerk powerup (the black medkit) last to the end of the level (or until you die, whichever comes first), and they don't wear off at all when your screen stops being red.
Happy fragging!
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