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yellowmadness54

what pleased you most about Doom?

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After just experiencing the shareware, and playing the full game, what were you most pleasantly surprised about?

For me, it was having sound, and fighting the cacodemons (I loved them...)
And use of two different plasma weapons, unoffered in the demo. Oh, and the fact you fought demons, not aliens like I, at the time, thought.

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I know it sounds silly, but I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't just a bunch of static images/rail shooter, like I had inferred from magazine photos, but that it was actually real-time 3D, and the best I had seen up to that day (excluding perhaps 3D texture mapping at the arcades, e.g. Daytona USA) :-p

Yeah, as strange as it sounds, I had read a nearly eulogistic article about it, which pretty much described it as the be-all, end-all of all games (and as it turned out, they were right...), but somehow didn't convey the whole 3D/real time/texture mapped aspect (and no, I hadn't even heard of Wolf3D). So it was a bit of a shock for me to actually see that you could navigate a texture-mapped world like you could with polygonal 3D games, and at a very acceptable frame rate and with kickass action, too (please, no more space/flight/driving sims...)

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Yeah OK OK, I had read all the "virtual reality crap", "3D environments", "16 animation stances [sic] per demon", seen screenshots and all that, but I simply couldn't conceive what the gameplay would be like. Of course I had played driving/flight sims with their polygonal 3D worlds, and I simply thought that they were the state of the art and that real-time 3D == flat polygons. So this "Doom" thing that everybody was talking about must be something else, perhaps something like Myst, but more "real time" than that.

I only knew for sure that "you shot stuff" and that "they [the enemies] came at you" (and guessed that they scaled and moved), so in my mind, I had made Doom to be something like the arcade rail shooters, e.g. Beast Busters or Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which were the closest thing I was familiar with, or so I thought.

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'What are they doing? Holy shit they're kicking the crap out of each other!'

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The armors and keys have blinking light!

You know, for the newborn, everything new is a surprise, but say whatever, I was more than impressed by the dynamicity of DooM. My brain automatically gave the entire game an "A" grade.

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I blew up an imp with the rocket launcher and contemplated if they were allowed to do that in a video game.

yellowmadness54 said:

For me, it was having sound

It's funny, for a long time I could never get the shareware audio to work properly. It wasn't until Doom 95 that I could get the sound to work.

Cell said:

You know, for the newborn, everything new is a surprise, but say whatever, I was more than impressed by the dynamicity of DooM. My brain automatically gave the entire game an "A" grade.

Like it deserves anything less.

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I played them when I was seven. Back then, the concept of a 'pleasing' game involved shooting things with guns

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I was absolutely blown away by being able to navigate through seemingly 3D worlds that had a non-linearity to them, rather than forcing you through an obvious, single path. It also pleased me greatly to see such an extraordinary amount of blood & gore and demonic imagery, which served as my first foray into my fascination with violence and blasphemy. It felt so "adult," to be playing this incredibly visceral and unapologetically morbid game, as I had gotten quite used to the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros., Commander Keen and other "cute" games.

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I first played it only about 2 years ago, after spending most of my time on mostly popular games like COD. The biggest thing that kept me to it was the sheer non-linearity; no ones telling what to do and how to do it. You have to figure everything out for yourself.

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The first time I played it was on the SNES at a young age. The fact that it scared the living daylights out of me was enough for me to be impressed.

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Processingcontrol said:

I first played it only about 2 years ago, after spending most of my time on mostly popular games like COD.


It is never too late for salvation and redemption, my childe. The Church Of Doom lovingly embraces all of its Lost Sheep and Prodigal Sons.

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Doom was the culmination of my shareware experience from the early 90s. Travel back to a time when downloading a couple of megs for a shareware game took a couple of hours, and you treasured each good discovery. Apogee, Epic Megagames, and id were the big three, with Softdisk also being common, but not as good (remember those awful Skunny games?) I didn't even know about Doom. I had played the crap out of Wolfenstein 3D, and I was blown away by it - where on the SNES could you play a game like this, or the Genesis?

One day my brother told me that he was finally going to download Raptor, even though it was going to take like three plus hours. The night he downloaded the game, I stayed at a friends house, but I was drooling in anticipation of how cool Raptor was going to be. So the next day I came home and asked about the new game. My brother said something to the effect of "forget Raptor for now, I also got DOOM."

I thought, "hu, well, I really want to play Raptor, but I'll see what the fuss is about." I think we were operating off of a 486/33 with 4 megs of ram, and after I realized that this was a highly detailed 3D game, I became highly skeptical. "This is going to run like shit," I predicted. But instead I was treated to a total feeling of immersion in a rich, smooth, fast, and frightening 3D world with zombie soldiers and strange brown aliens (what I called them originally) hurling fireballs at me. Every single idea and expectation I had previously had for what made video games good were completely sucked out the proverbial airlock, as I immediately converted to my new religion at the Church of Fucking Doom.

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The BFG9000. When I used it the first time, I used it like crazy since it was so powerful until in less than a minute I finally noticed my ammo count going from over 500 to under 200 so quickly, and realized it takes 40 cells for each shot.

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GoatLord said:

I was absolutely blown away by being able to navigate through seemingly 3D worlds that had a non-linearity to them, rather than forcing you through an obvious, single path. It also pleased me greatly to see such an extraordinary amount of blood & gore and demonic imagery, which served as my first foray into my fascination with violence and blasphemy.


control. i made other posts about how lightning fast the game is: that just climbing stairs in a modern game takes ages in comparison, and how the mouse often feels sluggish and unresponsive, especially in console ports. doom was nothing like this. for the first time, i felt that my game avatar - that's me - was doing exactly what i wanted him to do. controls are crisp and accurate. i could flick around in a split second and shoot someone right in the face, skill paid off, and the game's speed discouraged camping. i could play against other people as if i was me in that alien world, and this ability to evade almost everything the monsters threw at me made me feel in control, almost godlike.

then there was this dark, demonic art of doom, the demon faces, pentagrams, torches, corpses and whatever else, which i still like better that the generic military style prevalent today.

Maes said:

It is never too late for salvation and redemption, my childe. The Church Of Doom lovingly embraces all of its Lost Sheep and Prodigal Sons.


you mean lost souls :p

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What pleased you most about Doom?

The fact that id encouraged us to make our own levels/mods/TC's for Doom/Doom II.

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Maybe one of you can tell me what it was I actually saw first.. As a 12 year old I was at a friends house and he had this demo (not playable, I'm pretty sure) of a game like Wolfenstein that was coming out soon that he'd downloaded from a local BBS. Looked like a tech demo or something. Anyone know what it was?

When I saw that, I told my friends about a game called Doom coming out that was like Wolfenstein but it had better graphics, dark areas and stairs. And it looked awesome.

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It could have been a Wolfenstein clone from the era; shouldn't be hard to find out. I, however, recall this Doom screenshot slideshow app floating around BBS' not long before the game was officially released. I think it had some stupid voice playing in the background as well, but that's as much as I remember. Most likely not the one you saw since it was clearly Doom.

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Doom was the first 3D game that I could not get totally lost in. It was also the first 3D game that didn't disorient me, didn't feel like a slideshow, and didn't control like a robot.

Wolf3d, while still 3D, had no real "landmarks" to mark any progress. E1F1 did, sure, but only because you played the level constantly from a new game could you tell any distinct spaces. on E1F10, I can get so lost I give up completely. Doom levels always had unique areas, easy to describe (blinking maze room, crushing ceiling hallway) and, thank god, had a map.

The nice touches like smooth stopping after releasing a movement key really made a difference in movement. Wolf3d felt robotic in comparison, as if I were in a hoveround instead of walking.

I'm almost convinced that the main reason wolf3d was difficult in the harder levels was because of the controls.

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Getting to play with all the weapons and fight the new bosses of course. I can't think of anything more significant.

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I remember I had a hard time to adapt and immediately be impressed with the 3d world at first. For example wolfenstein. One friend showed me wolfenstein. Or it was spear of destiny where you start and there are various vines. He went through the vines to push a secret walls. As I was not accustomed to 3d worlds I have no recollection of how I felt about that experience. Probably like some random zooming sprites coming into view.

Then someone showed me doom. It was easier to adapt to the 3d world but I don't remember myself being impressed at first. It's strange. I just don't have recollection. Later I got it and I played a bit for the first time, I had to try it to see it myself (maybe when someone else is playing and you just stare you can't get it and usually this is a factor that causes motion sickness too). I remember going up to the stairs where you get the green armour and then I remember watching a shotgun trooper far away and I was impressed I could shoot that far or something and feel the depth.

I don't know why I didn't remember bigger impressions then. Maybe it was also because I have seen this game in a 386 then and it was slow. Maybe my brain had to adapt to the new experience.

Though, the real fun came when I got a CD(or disk?) from a computer magazine with an editor to make level for Doom. It was DEU. That must be 1996 and when we started the first levels for my masterpiece TsotsoFX. Later I got DeathDay CD with levels of Doom and editors, I found dmgraph, dmaud, we made sounds for our masterpiece TsotsoFX **

Today I can see it in prespective, I am still impressed by how well designed the textures are, how diverse are the monsters especially in Doom 2, how atmospheric and realistic levels you can build with such an old not fully 3d engine and of course I am impressed with the community too. And it still plays well and I have much more fun than most modern FPS and people stare at me playing this old game and wonder.

As for wolfenstein, I tried to play this too but somehow the engine made me get very bad motion sickness in 15 minutes and this is also true today. Maybe trying the accelerated ports might change this? I have never finished more than 2-3 maps in wolfenstein or spear of destiny, I have never seen the secret pacman level or other interesting stuff. And you are lost, and you press on every wall to find secrets, and this makes you more dizzy. Probably the hovercraft like movement too.

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Something that pleased me in retrospect about Doom, was how favourably it compared to its contemporary "competitors" from an optimization standpoint.

Doom was smooth, streamlined, optimized to the bone (well...at least compared to the other FPS of the time) if considering the video quality and world detail it could deliver. There were nasty Wolf3D clones like Corridor 7 that didn't seem any smoother despite using an inferior engine, or games like DN3 and Quake which played much worse under the same specs as Doom (486DX/50, 8 MB), and if you reduced the detail low enough for them to playable then they were clearly inferior to Doom.

I remember trying DN3 from a games CD, suffering with the horrible frame rate and then Ultimate Doom from the same CD: going back to UD felt like being back in Heaven, in comparison and in absolute terms.

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Comparing Doom to the Build or Quake engines is a bit pointless as those are quite a bit more complex. Build is closer to ZDoom in terms what it can do. I wanna see how well ZDoom would run in DOS on a 486/DX.

And Quake actually is proper 3d with polygons instead of raycasting, whole different thing and I imagine stuff like z-sorting that stuff is a bit more complex too.

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That's exactly the point: at system specs parity, they didn't look as good. Lowering Quake to a 80x40 window and STILL being a slideshow didn't make it look any more impressive than Doom, despite downplaying it. DN3's "quarter detail" mode, also didn't look even a hair more impressive than Doom.

With my -then naive- mindset, I reasoned that "better" games should also be more optimized or something, and delivering all of the performance of the "older and worse" ones for the same levels of visuals, plus something extra. Obviously that was not going to be the case ever since....

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Maes said:

That's exactly the point: at system specs parity, they didn't look as good. Lowering Quake to a 80x40 window and STILL being a slideshow didn't make it look any more impressive than Doom, despite downplaying it. DN3's "quarter detail" mode, also didn't look even a hair more impressive than Doom.

With my -then naive- mindset, I reasoned that "better" games should also be more optimized or something, and delivering all of the performance of the "older and worse" ones for the same levels of visuals, plus something extra. Obviously that was not going to be the case ever since....

I think that only happened because you were forming your opinions at an odd time in gaming history. I got NBA 96 or something for PSX for Christmas and I remember thinking the same thing.. for how "advanced" these 3d graphics are, they sure suck. And I wished they'd stop making crappy polygons and just make sprites.

It was like switching from throwing a baseball side armed to coming over the top like you should. Graphics were worse for a while, but was a necessary step so they could eventually get better.

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It's all subjective. I don't like the look of polygon stuff, even the most advanced engines of today. To make matters worse, they also tend to go heavy on the lighting effects and other things that just end up looking cheesy to me (and thus often distracting).

I don't even like higher graphics resolutions in advanced Doom engines. Textures and sprites look wrong, and you end up with some weird disparity of detail. 320x200 or bust! ;)

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