RetroAhoy: Doom

This guy always makes top notch documentaries.

I liked it. Contrarily to most documentaries about Doom I've ever seen which come with a plethora of factual errors, this one's only kinks were that the player didn't understand how the BFG works and that his choice of usermade PWADs he showed in the video could have been much better.

This was really good!

Love his videos.

Very good.

This guy has some really good videos, I'd recommend them. At the end he hints at a similar video about Quake, I'll keep an eye on it. :)

Saw, wasn't expecting it to be almost an hour, was really cool.

Great video. Been waiting for this one since I saw the Wolf3D one when it came out.

Holy shit this must have taken ages to put together. Really well done video. Quite a few interesting facts - and I generally know most Doom trivia but he found new ones and put together something really special here. Easily the best Doom documentary out there.

I thought it was OK, and obviously produced well, but I wish there was more in the way of commentary / analysis and less focus on just rote recitation of stuff you can find on the Doom Wiki. 50 minutes is a little long for something so dry.

Thanks for sharing this - seems far better than several other videos of the same ilk. Will be watching it in pieces.

Finally had the time to watch it, I really liked it. One of the few guys on YouTube that actually knows what he's talking about.

scifista42 said:

this one's only kinks were that the player didn't understand how the BFG works and that his choice of usermade PWADs he showed in the video could have been much better.

I agree on the PWADs selection, but I don't get what you mean about the BFG. He talked about 10 seconds about it...

scifista42 said:

his choice of usermade PWADs he showed in the video could have been much better.

I think that given the nature of the series he's doing, he decided to focus on Doom as a "historical" game, and showed some notable WADs that came out in the time period before the source code release and phase II of its existence. You'll notice there was no mention of the source code release or any of the goings-on since then.

But then of course he specifically mentions Brutal Doom near the end, which seems to sort of invalidate that theory though.

Ahoy has some of the most high quality documentaries of any youtuber. His uploads are sometimes far and few between with the one on Doom taking roughly 2 months but it was well worth the wait. Also his voice is just simply amazing :).

Zed said:

I agree on the PWADs selection, but I don't get what you mean about the BFG. He talked about 10 seconds about it...

He used the weapon in an obviously inefficient way as he played E3M8, and he simplified its description by claiming that one shot clears an entire room (quoting Wikipedia) which isn't quite accurate (but forgivable, I think).

worth watching for the Garth Marenghi style narration alone

I Like that kind of videos where there's no silly childish screams , or Goofy comments .

Well, after everyone and their grandma's reaction I gave the video a try and it was rather underwhelming. Sure, it has high production quality, the guy has a good voice and for once the info given is topical and mostly correct, yay! However for 50 minutes of viewtime the content was pretty shallow and sometimes bordering on banal. Introducing all the items, weapons and monsters with overly dramatic and praising descriptions felt trite and cringy to me and served no real purpose for a new player. Oh, armor bonuses, I remember those! Doom! I understand that delving deeper into the community output could require unacceptable amounts of background research, but why make the show so long then?

Reasonably interesting video although I almost died of boredom when describing the weapons and enemies one by one. Also I didn't learn anything new.

What I didn't like was how Brutal Doom was presented as rekindling interest in the game. Whereas the reality is that the interest has always been there and reinforced by the source ports available.

Yeah a little drawn out but I enjoyed it.

VGA said:

Reasonably interesting video although I almost died of boredom when describing the weapons and enemies one by one. Also I didn't learn anything new.

What I didn't like was how Brutal Doom was presented as rekindling interest in the game. Whereas the reality is that the interest has always been there and reinforced by the source ports available.

Doom fans most likely won't learn anything new, and I don't think that is the point....Its just about making a video to yet again archive it, and people who aren't as familiar with it who don't know so much can view it. Plus even if you know a lot of things about something it can be fun to see the history even if you know it already.

I agree the video was a bit bland though and the Brutal Doom mod may have regained interest for some, so he is half right there. But yeah he must not have realised that interest in Doom never really went away.

If there wasn't interest then GZDoom would not be at the feature point it reached and neither would most of the assets used in BD even exist.

I'm finding these reasonably high-production videos really quite funny, because they're obviously intended to connect the modern type of "gamers" with classic doom; whereas I've fallen completely out of the gaming community (a long time ago) so I'm more-or-less the opposite kind of person (although I'm not all that up on the doom community either really, in so much as so much of it seems to be taking place in the (g)zdoom sphere). So I glean stuff from these videos to enlighten me as to what modern gamers/gaming/game culture/blah is all about, which is roughly the opposite of the author's intentions.

Jon said:

So I glean stuff from these videos to enlighten me as to what modern gamers/gaming/game culture/blah is all about, which is roughly the opposite of the author's intentions.

So it's like watching an instructional film from the 1950s to see prevailing attitudes, rather than actually learning how to clean your house or whatever.