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We’re all Doomed
Jan. 23rd, 2020 04:36 pmI’ve come down with one of those tiresome illnesses that doesn’t feel quite bad enough to justify retiring to my bedroom but does feel bad enough that I bitterly resent having to still do the mundane necessities of life. I very rarely get physically ill and I tend to shake things off fairly quickly but it’s left me wanting to do something relatively undemanding with my free time.
I am playing Doom for at least the tenth time. When I was young I preferred Doom 2, and while I do enjoy the extra weapon and the expanded range of monsters, the level design just isn’t quite as good and that’s what has lasted. I play quite a lot of Doom mods and expanded map packs, some which tweak the game, some which turn it into something completely different; like the one that turns Doom into a beat ‘em up, the karting game that runs on the Doom engine, or the ludicrous attempt to do a FPS version of Castlevania. Every so often though I like to go back to the source and run the game without any of the fancy add ins. It’s still not quite the retail version of Doom I played in the 90s, there’s a bunch of little quality of life improvements but nothing that really alters the game fundamentally.
Doom, I am happy to report, is still great. What I love about Doom is how fast and tight it plays. You can zoom around the levels at a million miles per hour, spinning and strafing round a horde of memorable enemies but you can also tiptoe round the levels, ducking in and out of cover, and taking things more cautiously. In my play through I’ve had to do both. Because of how chunky and modular the world of Doom is the rules of the game feel very graspable and fair, it’s easy to get a sense of when enemies can hit you and when they can’t. It’s simple, almost like playing a game made out of Duplo blocks, but that means that you don’t get many of those janky or unfair moments that more complicated physics engines have.
I had forgotten, because I always forget, how much of a difficulty spike there is between episodes. As always I breezed through episode one and then found episode two a sudden slap to the face. It’s fine. Tricky rather than proper hard. They save proper hard for episode three where the early levels are very light on ammunition which meant I spent a pleasant twenty minutes methodically punching demons to death which is somehow both satisfying and frustrating at the same time. The lack of a chainsaw early doors means that you can’t afford to play sloppily. If there’s a weakness it’s that after those early levels episode three doesn’t really have anything else to throw at you and the escalation is more about increasing monster density than it is asking you master any new skills. That’s a minor quibble in a game that still feels remarkably fresh twenty five years after I first played it.
Once I’ve beaten the fourth chapter I think I might go back to playing the Aliens TC game that was made for Doom not long after it came out. That one, unsurprisingly for a fan mod, feels a little rough around the edges, but it still creates a hellish amount of tension.
I am playing Doom for at least the tenth time. When I was young I preferred Doom 2, and while I do enjoy the extra weapon and the expanded range of monsters, the level design just isn’t quite as good and that’s what has lasted. I play quite a lot of Doom mods and expanded map packs, some which tweak the game, some which turn it into something completely different; like the one that turns Doom into a beat ‘em up, the karting game that runs on the Doom engine, or the ludicrous attempt to do a FPS version of Castlevania. Every so often though I like to go back to the source and run the game without any of the fancy add ins. It’s still not quite the retail version of Doom I played in the 90s, there’s a bunch of little quality of life improvements but nothing that really alters the game fundamentally.
Doom, I am happy to report, is still great. What I love about Doom is how fast and tight it plays. You can zoom around the levels at a million miles per hour, spinning and strafing round a horde of memorable enemies but you can also tiptoe round the levels, ducking in and out of cover, and taking things more cautiously. In my play through I’ve had to do both. Because of how chunky and modular the world of Doom is the rules of the game feel very graspable and fair, it’s easy to get a sense of when enemies can hit you and when they can’t. It’s simple, almost like playing a game made out of Duplo blocks, but that means that you don’t get many of those janky or unfair moments that more complicated physics engines have.
I had forgotten, because I always forget, how much of a difficulty spike there is between episodes. As always I breezed through episode one and then found episode two a sudden slap to the face. It’s fine. Tricky rather than proper hard. They save proper hard for episode three where the early levels are very light on ammunition which meant I spent a pleasant twenty minutes methodically punching demons to death which is somehow both satisfying and frustrating at the same time. The lack of a chainsaw early doors means that you can’t afford to play sloppily. If there’s a weakness it’s that after those early levels episode three doesn’t really have anything else to throw at you and the escalation is more about increasing monster density than it is asking you master any new skills. That’s a minor quibble in a game that still feels remarkably fresh twenty five years after I first played it.
Once I’ve beaten the fourth chapter I think I might go back to playing the Aliens TC game that was made for Doom not long after it came out. That one, unsurprisingly for a fan mod, feels a little rough around the edges, but it still creates a hellish amount of tension.
