DOOM lovers in the UK

Does anyone know any groups, meet ups or societies or even other forums where DOOM players in the UK get together?

The thing about the DOOM community is that it's mostly online, and most of my pals aren't interested in DOOM (CoD instead -- *vomit*). I feel alone in my love for this fantastic game. I've tried to organise a lan party, but my mates are just not motivated at all - They aren't even PC gamers either :/

Something I've thought of, is to have a lan party where you both play AND design. E.g. You have 30 minutes to design a map (super speedmapping) and then you exchange maps and play with headphones on. Cycle ad infinitum. Add in a few beers and this would be heaven for me. Am I weird?

Fellow Brit Doomer here (Yorkshire) but I've never been overly bothered about meeting other players in person, as novel as I suppose it would be. Communicating, collaborating and co-oping online is as good as I've ever known it to be right now.

unbirthday said:

I've tried to organise a lan party, but my mates are just not motivated at all - They aren't even PC gamers either :/

Have you tried to make it console-gamer friendly? I.E. use gamepads and HDTVs. Paging 40oz to this thread, he's done a setup like this.

If worse comes to worse, you could try the Xbox 360 ports. Of course, that restricts you to IWAD only content.

unbirthday said:

Something I've thought of, is to have a lan party where you both play AND design. E.g. You have 30 minutes to design a map (super speedmapping) and then you exchange maps and play with headphones on. Cycle ad infinitum. Add in a few beers and this would be heaven for me.

That would actually be pretty cool.

purist said:

(Yorkshire)

Mate, I'm in Yorkshire too. Small world. Do you use Steam?

Sodaholic said:

Have you tried to make it console-gamer friendly?

No. I could offer bars of gold-pressed latinum and they'd still not be bothered. I've given up. I hate console gamers.

Also, with the lan party, we were supposed to use laptops, but it never happened. I even have 3 old Athlon XP laptops (DOOM isn't exactly hardware intensive) which I was offering up.

The thing is, I've moved back to my parents town recently as I'm skint and now I don't know anyone here anymore. My old schoolmates are just uneducated nutcases. I prefer to do creative stuff such as designing levels or maps for 2D games. I prefer to play Sim City 4 or Toki Tori than Call of Duty. At the moment I'm playing the alpha of Broforce, Age of Wonders 2 and a DOOM wad called Base Ganymede. Newer games are just so crappy that it bewilders me. I'm 30 this year, and I'm not going to waste my time with another DOOM clone. I played Bioshock Infinite and Dishonored. I wasn't impressed. The gaming industry is just like Hollywood now - churns out shitty unoriginal, uninspired rubbish with a liberal slant and a good dollop of special effects to woo those that haven't been around as long. I now find myself aligning in almost perfect sync with the words of gentlemen like Jonathan Blow and Bret Victor.

It would be interesting to try to form a group in the north of England. A group dedicated to original gaming, creative gameplaying, game design and sharing of resources. It wouldn't have to be dedicated to one game, but games that are original, require creativity, puzzle-solving or are simply interesting and allow original asset replacement as with DOOM. Or in other words: people who like to play interesting games and like to make content for them.

unbirthday said:

The thing about the DOOM community is that it's mostly online, and most of my pals aren't interested in DOOM (CoD instead -- *vomit*). I feel alone in my love for this fantastic game. I've tried to organise a lan party, but my mates are just not motivated at all - They aren't even PC gamers either.

OMFG.

Same here.


I'm also from the UK.



But I'm 13.


Conclusion: You're me from the future.

Liverpool here, originally from London. Speed-mapping and LAN parties sound like fun...

The real question is, is it true that Plus Net is really great, honest broadband? To answer your question yes, sunshine I am from a small town in Britland (Bedfordshire) which the only thing going for it is the amount of Frusli bars that the local Mill produces.

unbirthday said:

Mate, I'm in Yorkshire too. Small world. Do you use Steam?

Oh really, what part? I'm in Hull, which is East Yorkshire. I have Steam but only because I needed it run Football Manager. Other than using it to play that I don't know anything about it to be honest.

Springy said:

The real question is, is it true that Plus Net is really great, honest broadband?

Yes. I'm on them and you get 20 meg broadband at £5.99 a month for the first 10 months if you buy your line rental for a year (some 70-odd quid, I think) - last two months were £9.99. I don't get the full 20, but I'm in a big block of flats, so I can live with that. Streams and the like work just fine and download speeds aren't awful.

Andover here- nobody here interested in Doom...or anything worth looking at.. D;
I'm not your age (23 though!) but yeah...would be neat to have some kind of thing- but if you don't really know the people around you it can be a bit daunting.. Where I am it's pretty isolated from anything worth looking at >w>

I live in Lancashire and love Doom. The better county to that Yorkshire one. :D

I live near Cambridge, nice part of the country actually (no I'm not posh :P)
As far as I know there isn't a British doom community which is similar to the likes of the French or Russian ones in popularity.

cannonball said:

I live near Cambridge, nice part of the country actually (no I'm not posh :P)
As far as I know there isn't a British doom community which is similar to the likes of the French or Russian ones in popularity.

I liked Cambridge when I was there for 15 months in my last job, although the bus links to the retirement village of Histon where I was based and actually worked were awful enough that I just often did the 70-minute walk on Sundays instead.

As for the idea of a British Doom community - I think we have the good fortune to share a common language with ex-colonies and the Commonwealth, plus use a very popular second language for other parts of the world, so we get defaulted in to the "main" community.

There still needs to be a British made megawad to rival Whitemare, 3HA and Zones of Fear though :-)

here still needs to be a British made megawad to rival Whitemare, 3HA and Zones of Fear though :-)

Yes.
Yes.

edit: While I haven't played it, there's also the French 3 heures d'agonie (sorry for any mispelling) megawad, so it's not like Russia have done the only "National Megawad"

unbirthday said:

Something I've thought of, is to have a lan party where you both play AND design. E.g. You have 30 minutes to design a map (super speedmapping) and then you exchange maps and play with headphones on. Cycle ad infinitum. Add in a few beers and this would be heaven for me. Am I weird?

That sounds cool, I'd love to throw together something like that. Sadly I'm the only one out of my friends who loves DOOM so much.

purist said:

There still needs to be a British made megawad to rival Whitemare, 3HA and Zones of Fear though :-)

I'm fully onboard with this idea.

Me too.

Er, if I count. I sort of gave the UK a 10,000-mile berth when I moved to Australialand.

Eris Falling said:

edit: While I haven't played it, there's also the French 3 heures d'agonie (sorry for any mispelling) megawad, so it's not like Russia have done the only "National Megawad"

That's the one I meant when I said 3HA. I abbreviated because I also wasn't sure on the spelling :-)

Phobus said:

I'm fully onboard with this idea.

Eris Falling said:

Yes.
Yes.

Jimmy said:

Me too.

Er, if I count. I sort of gave the UK a 10,000-mile berth when I moved to Australialand.

Aw, this is not a good time for me to commit to a new project but if this happens next year, I'm well up for it.

I live in Oxfordshire, so pretty far away from most of you guys by the sound of it - but it'd be cool to lend my limited mapping abilities to a UK WAD sometime...

A British doom community wad would be pretty cool to be honest. Doom Britannia.

Us British people should create a megawad together, what it would be about is really anybodies guess.

Me and Springy are discussing this very idea right this minute!

Eris Falling: We need to improve our mapping for next year.
              If purist forgets about the British megawad I will hold him at gunpoint until he remembers 
Nukeaholic: Well, there was one planned 
Nukeaholic: On the #Brit channel 
Nukeaholic: Still has text requesting mappers 
Eris Falling: That's probably too obscure though

Should be about Doomguy trying to overthrow the new rule that all plastic bags will start costing 5p- and he takes it all the way to the Queen but you find out that it's secretly Mecha-hitler all along! DAMN THAT NAZI SCUM

Fellow brit here from Sussex. I do like the idea of a new brit wad or megawad, and a year and a half ago I actually started one but it died due to lack of interest. There's a few of us that sometimes hang around in #brit on the Zandronum irc network.

Originally from Stockport (Cheshire) and I now reside in Huddersfield (West Yorkshire)!!!

Dave

I lurk around the Greater London/Surrey area. Haven't hosted or been to a LAN party in a few years now, but they were always good fun. Of course that was because everyone was only a few miles apart and we'd known each other since school anyway; journeying across half the UK for something similar with a what would amount to a bunch of strangers isn't something I'd really consider, because I am lazy.

I'm on board with the idea of making a MegaWAD however. I'm sure I have stacks of old unfinished shit on my HDD that I could resume work on or recycle from dead projects.

mrthejoshmon said:

Us British people should create a megawad together, what it would be about is really anybodies guess.

Colonising the Universe.

Kent coast here, but sometimes I also pretend to be Canadian. That might become more permanent one day, dunno yet. Still here for the time being, though.

A megawad could be cool. What about us Scots though? We may not be British anymore in a few months. :P

Well, you and Enjay best get your maps in before September 18th, then ;)