John Romero Plays DOOM

Fascinating, I liked hearing backround stories for each map

I'm not really getting what the JP hate is all about, I must be watching a different version. In mine it has two guys, one the founder of our Doom and the other a game industry vet himself, talking about a subject that they are familiar with in an engaging, relaxed and informative manner.

He's not the same guy who made arcadia demade for doom 2 is he?

That is he.

Linguica said:

It's weird that he brings up Deathtag several times in the videos. I can't even remember the last time I had heard about that.

I never really 'got' deathtag. Any time me and friends tried to play, it just turned into a weird "cooperative deathmatch" with us all just fucking around. Maybe the maps just haven't aged well or something.

I remember having quite a bit of fun in the skulltag game mode because the points system was actually coded in and the maps were generally lots of fun, but no one seems to play that at all anymore.

The demo leaderboard with build in .lmp's updated from DSDA would be an awesome source port feature.

I never really liked the par times. It always felt to me like the game was insulting me for taking my time to thoroughly explore the level. I know that wasn't the intention, but naming it "par" implies that any "normal" player should be able to finish the level in that time during typical play. I suppose it means more like a speedrunning par time, but still.

Having some kind of dedicated "challenge" mode with specific goals seems to be a far better implementation of the same concept. Having the players define their own goals and seeing if they can achieve them within given limits is a lot more fun than the game imposing some arbitrary time limit with no specified goal.

I always heh'd when I got the "TIME: SUCKS" message after strolling leisurely through some of the bigger maps for the first time.

The game never "imposed" par times as time limits any more than it forced you to wander through each level and find every single health bonus in order to get the 100% items stat. They're both just numbers on the screen after you've finished, encouraging you to play again. Most of those numbers are meant to make you think, "hmm, I bet I could go back and explore that level further!" The par time is the only one meant to make you think, "hmm, I bet I could do that again, but faster / more skillfully!"

Anyway, being able to record and replay demos means that the game can be treated as "challenge mode" already. Players can record any level, under whatever conditions they want, with any goal in mind. Leaderboards integrated within the game interface, as Romero opined, can be cool, but I think the devs adding some sort of separate, structured "challenge mode" (ala Timesplitters 2?) would ultimately feel watered down compared to what the community is already capable of with the near-total freedom we've been given.

As for this video series, it was a very enjoyable watch. Plenty of fun trivia, particularly about Romero's design sensibilities. Also interesting to know that Prey was Tom Hall's baby (so much for paying attention to the credits), and that JP called the monster "ambush" flag what it actually is. =)

he was making verbal nods to demonstrate attentiveness and to fill the silence.

engaging, relaxed and informative manner.

You guys must be exhausting to hang out with. I watched two minutes of the later part of video 1, and he was interjecting Romero's speech with yeps, yeahs and laughs consistently. As if trapped in some Youtube version of Speed in which falling below 50 words per minute would set off the bomb. This was so disappointing after his own intro, where he sounded coherent and relevant. I don't blame him for gushing over Romero, but this is too cringeworthy for me.

40oz said:

He's not the same guy who made arcadia demade for doom 2 is he?

He is.

http://vectorpoem.com/

Phml said:

...interjecting Romero's speech with yeps, yeahs and laughs consistently.

I agree. Very annoying. His "comments" really spoil the videos.
Thanks to Fuzzyfireball for linking to them, though.

Phml said:

You guys must be exhausting to hang out with. I watched two minutes of the later part of video 1, and he was interjecting Romero's speech with yeps, yeahs and laughs consistently. As if trapped in some Youtube version of Speed in which falling below 50 words per minute would set off the bomb. This was so disappointing after his own intro, where he sounded coherent and relevant. I don't blame him for gushing over Romero, but this is too cringeworthy for me.

I noticed that too. I actually open up a text editor, and started marking each time the guy said "yeah". About halfway through the first video, I was up to 42 "yeahs", and 25 "you knows", and about 25 "likes". Then, I got tired of actually listening to him to keep the score going (and, felt I was being a bit dickish) so I stopped. But, the guy is massively annoying.

Finished the series, great stuff, so much better than that IGN interview a while back. It was nice having someone actually knowledgable about the game talking with Romero, the two playing off each other a bit on commentary was great.

Shame they didn't cover Romero's Doom 2 levels. They touch on MAP26 a bit and MAP29 gets a passing mention in the E4M2 discussion, but other than that the only thing that comes up is MAP11's name. Would be really nice to hear Romero talk about designing the Doom 2 maps, especially since we don't have alphas to see how the maps changed over development.

I do wish there was more in the way of interviews and retrospectives on the development of Doom 2. For being the game that most of us generally play / design WADs for, it really gets short shrift in the historical department. Master of Doom is still probably the thing that tells the most about that time period.

Phml said:

I watched two minutes of the later part of video 1, and he was interjecting Romero's speech with yeps, yeahs and laughs consistently. As if trapped in some Youtube version of Speed in which falling below 50 words per minute would set off the bomb.

And it gets only worse later on, with Romero rambling from Keen to Quake to Deathtag and the series of "yeahs" and "totally" growing ever more strained.
Romero appeared to handle it more or less OK, I would have been annoyed to pieces in his place.

Most of the viewers don't seem to mind or even notice; they probably communicate this way in RL themselves. Hell, I've met quite a few guys like that in NY. Either naturally high-strung or doing too much nose candy.

Sodaholic said:

That wasn't asskissing.

No, it wasn't.

Sodaholic said:

Romero didn't say

Right.

Sodaholic said:

anything particularly disagreeable.

Totally.

Sodaholic said:

Asskissing would be if he were excessively complementing while putting the focus on himself,

Yeah.

Sodaholic said:

kinda like "look at me, Romero is talking to ME!".

That's exactly the point.

Sodaholic said:

He wasn't doing that,

No.

Sodaholic said:

he was making verbal nods

Right, verbal nods...

Sodaholic said:

to demonstrate attentiveness and to fill the silence.

Couldn't put it better myself.

Sodaholic said:

Romero remained the central focus.

Pretty much.

The issue is not asskissing; going by the intro, JP seems to be a bright, intelligent person who knows his worth. The issue is the verbal nods. I just did the written equivalent above. Even if you couldn't hear it in the videos, perhaps you could see how annoying they are.

When done in the form of a forum post, it looks sarcastic and passive-aggressive instead of being meaninglessly phatic.

I guess I used the wrong word with "asskissing", but I guess you know what I mean now. Several people noticed I see.

Now I feel bad for the guy :( I guess it had to do with playing Doom with Romero...I mean, thats quite the thing to do :P

It's also worth noting that, in this kind of situation, the standard things that you would use to convey to your in-person interlocutor that you were listening - namely, eye-contact and nodding - were not available to JPL, since Romero was playing the game; in this situation, I suspect I would also rely more heavily on phatic expressions.

Linguica said:

"I recently gave the source to DoomEd to somebody to put on OSX. So that may happen."

I really hope he puts that on github or something so that somebody can port it to Linux.

Then I can run it on GNUStep and then this odd daydream of mine will be complete heh

To be fair, were critiquing a web series that only just started one episode ago, and is being hosted by someone who develops video games, not an actually trained or experienced talk show host. To his credit, if I had the opportunity to speak to the guy who created what I humbly accept to be the greatest video game ever made that I devoted thousands of hours of my life too, I'd probably be babbling and cycling through limitless incomprehensible questions to ask.

If he's anything like me, the instant he walked out of John romeros house he was probably thinking "shit I really wish I asked more about this and this and this" etc. etc.

Tldr interviewing someone, particularly someone you consider to be much mightier than you is much easier said than done.

I do agree that doom 2 seems to be pretty neglected. It would be interesting to learn more about the levels and other stuff in that game but I guess there aren't that many interesting anecdotes or trivia about it that we don't already know.

These videos would have been great reference a few years ago when doom the way id did was in development.

cq75 said:

I really hope he puts that on github or something so that somebody can port it to Linux.

Then I can run it on GNUStep and then this odd daydream of mine will be complete heh

I'm totally making a map with DoomEd if it does get out to us.

Can we have a John Romero Quake E1 playthrough now?

I'm a windows user, but I really want to try DoomEd too. Watching these videos made me very curious because Romero seemed to remember it being super easy to use. I've always wanted to make maps the 'official' way.

Doom Builder wass the best thing to happen to the mapping community though, it really streamlined everything in such a user friendly way. I remember it being a hassle to connect two sectors.. The olden days!

Oh also, what 40oz said. He was there with the big man himself - Even though Romero is a cool, chill dude, you would be a bit nervous, or maybe just starstruck, trying to think of the right things to say would be pretty tough. What we got was an interesting and informative look into some unexplored territory of Doom's development. I'll very happily take that. Anyway, John seemed totally at easy the whole time - He's probably used to long time fans being a bit nervous, especially someone who now does it for a career.

Touchdown said:

Can we have a John Romero Quake E2 playthrough now?

FTFY

Doomkid said:

I remember it being a hassle to connect two sectors.. The olden days!

What editor did you use? It's not hard with DEU or derived editors like DETH and Yadex. You can make two sectors with the rectangle or polygon tool, then drag a linedef from one onto that of another, and it will ask you if you want to merge the vertices and linedefs that occupy the same space, so you say Y and that's basically it. Only thing is if the sectors have floor/ceiling height differences then you have to take care of the upper/lower textures on that linedef. But it's easy to tell which ones to edit because the editor marks them for you visually when you hover over that linedef, and also it will zero in on that and any other linedef needing attention when you run the various consistency checks (check for missing textures, in this case).

However, there is no 3D view. And aligning textures can be a pain sometimes. It's good to have a calculator handy... Now you know why so many old wads don't have good texture alignment!

Dragonsbrethren said:

FTFY

What's so special about Quake's E2?

Patrol1985 said:

What's so special about Quake's E2?

John Romero made all of E2, except for E2M7. The only level in E1 he did was E1M1. He also did E3M1, & the final boss map as well.

Patrol1985 said:

What's so special about Quake's E2?

He made the levels in Quake's E2.

Patrol1985 said:

What's so special about Quake's E2?

It's the episode that Romero mainly worked on, like E1 was in Doom.

Edit: Major ninja'd, heh.

40oz said:

He's not the same guy who made arcadia demade for doom 2 is he?

He also wrote this excellent article.

http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74