Young Doomers: Why this game?

[Super Jamie]

Alot of us here are in our mid-20s or older, I just turned 26 this year and I know alot of current regulars are about the same age. Most of the dudes in the Compet-N Bios have a few years up on me, common birth ages seeming to be around 1976-1980.

Why we originally got into Doom is pretty obvious: It was our childhood. I still remember the first time I flicked through the manual, loaded up those old floppies and was just blown away by this game that had obviously life-changing significance.

I know we have a few members here who are quite young, I've seen ages 16, 18 and 19 thrown around recently. I think it's awesome that younger dudes are getting into Doom too, it throws some fresh enthusiasm and influences into the community, and helps it to grow instead of us all getting old and moving on to let the modding community stagnate and die.

So my question is this: Young Doomers, with so much other videogame influences growing up and probably friends who'd rather play Halo 3 than "that old pixelated piece of crap", what draws you to good old 15-yearold Doom?

[pavera]

Doom was my childhood too. Just because I was 2 when it came out didn't stop me from playing it since day one.

[Maes]

I'm not one of those youngsters, but I recall a statement from an obscure games magazine (I think it was the italian "Giochi per il mio computer", 1997 or 1998 summer edition). They had yet another "Best 100 games of all times" and Doom was on the list, at position 35 or 36 I recall.

The comment underneat the tiny zcreenshot was "Doom is obviously no longer a top-10 product, and to be honest it could rank even lower in this ladder, if it was not for the fact that it's one of the few games allowing for a decent single player experience."

It was true then, and it's true today.

[David_Dweedle]

Cause its a good game.

Dont Sterotype us young gamers with Graphic whores :P some of us young gamers actually play games for the games.. Doom is one of the best FPS ever.. comeing second only to Unreal Tournament(Yeah I know im gonna get boo'ed and hiss'ed at)

[eargosedown]

Born in june '92.

I play doom for quite a few reasons. First and foremost I grew up on it (Well sort of). It was the first PC game I ever played, and the first FPS. The theme and pace of the game stuck with me, and although I didn't play it for about 10 years, it was always the standard.

The second reason would definitely be the atmosphere. Doom brings something to the table very few games do. The graphics are crap in comparison to what we have now, the animations are poor, it uses outdated sprites instead of 3d models, the music is in midi format, the engine and physics are simple.... but even with all that against it, it's immersive and atmospheric. These games today with all their fancy stuff can't even come close to the perfection of this game hit back in early 90s.
Doom has just such a lasting affect I reckon. Everything I see I usually contrast to the game consciously or subconsciously. The music and covers of the music are on my media player, right along with the songs they're based off of. The emotions conveyed with the game are unique, ie: Go play through E1M8 on nightmare with a pistol start, with the sound cranked up, the music loud, and in the dark... No other game has ever hit that same sense of reluctance to progress for the inevitable death you're going to face at the hands of the Phobos Anomaly. Nothing else will ever give that same sense of desperation that Dead Simples music and gameplay will convey. For a game with little to no plot and continuity, it holds better than most movies and games that have indepth storys.

Finally, the community. I could probably play the next year straight, without breaks or sleeping, by playing every single Wad produced by the community... That is ALOT of content. More keeps coming out daily too. If you want to do something with the engine, you can figure out a way. Not to mention the co-op and the death matching that's balanced and still very fun to this day.

When I look at Doom 3, it almost makes me laugh at the irony... They tried to bring the game up to speed with the modern times, and it turned out poor (In my opinion) because it lost what made it special, and yet when you turn on the Classic Doom 3 mod which adds alot of that stuff back, it's quite amazing. Once again, the community at work!

I don't think Doom will ever be outgrown by me. I love this game and everything it brings.

[ArmouredBlood]

The ease of play. A lot of my friends are into starcraft and we often joked about how we could fit it onto usb flash drives and play off of any windows computer if we could just figure it out, well I can already do that with doom. Even with a laptop sometimes you just want to go to the computer lab and soak up a little time without setting the thing up :D

Also the fast-paced single player, very few games have the player speed be so high and have such a high emphasis on dodging attacks versus turtling in cover. I absolutely hate modern games that do that, turning battles into trench warfare. There's just something liberating about running everywhere ;)

And graphics, well they're just uninteresting to me. I may say some game looks good, but I never feel the inclination that I MUST play that game, and if I do it's because the gameplay looks fun. Also I was orginally an RTS/RPG player, so graphics figure very little into the equation when you're playing games with 200+ units on the field or dealing with GBA or N64 graphics, which is about the best older but good RPGs had. The best graphical RTS I've played recently is either sins of a solar empire or supreme commander, and while both looked good, it lagged play a lot, which is not what you want an RTS to do EVER -.-

I'm sure there are other angles I have, but those are the ones that spring to mind.

[peterPROSTHETICS]

I'm 16......i like Doom cause....

IT'S MOTHER-FUCKING DOOM!!!!!!!


nah, i say fuck off with graphics.... i play to have fun, not to look at the real world threw my computer, for me to like a game, it has to be fun, fast, and most of all...CHALLENGING......fuck man, halo is way to easy.(and slow....)

I'm gonna admit though, i am a sucker for the battlefield games....There too bloody fun...

[pavera]

I have a lot of memories with Doom. Me and my dad would explore every nook and cranny, killing all the monsters and getting all the secrets. Even at that age I was completely sucked in by the atmosphere, the music, the colors, and most of all: the sounds. I was so obsessed with Doom that I would run around my house making a shotgun with my hands pretending to blast things.

I even got my friends into Doom, and when we weren't playing it, we were laying nerf guns all over my back yard and having deathmatches. And who said video games turn kids into mindless killers?

That's why I play Doom today.

[AveryMaurice]

David_Dweedle said:

Cause its a good game.

Dont Sterotype us young gamers with Graphic whores :P some of us young gamers actually play games for the games.. Doom is one of the best FPS ever..

Everything he said.

David_Dweedle said:

...comeing second only to Unreal Tournament(Yeah I know im gonna get boo'ed and hiss'ed at)

Without this.

I am 15 by the way.

[peterPROSTHETICS]

David_Dweedle said:

Cause its a good game.

Dont Sterotype us young gamers with Graphic whores :P some of us young gamers actually play games for the games.. Doom is one of the best FPS ever.. comeing second only to Unreal Tournament(Yeah I know im gonna get boo'ed and hiss'ed at)

Haha, UT99 is pretty fun under 2 circumstances.....

#1 Multiplayer With My Mates
#2 When I'm High as Fuck..... **

[David_Dweedle]

peterPROSTHETICS said:

Haha, UT99 is pretty fun under 2 circumstances.....

#1 Multiplayer With My Mates
#2 When I'm High as Fuck..... **

Only way I can play UT is if i got Coke or Pepsi.. I need the suger rush otherwise I get owned on Godlike lol

[Breadrobber]

I have been playing Doom since I was 3 or 4. It was, as I recall, the first video game I ever played. It's just in my blood, man. I strongly believe it to be one of the greatest games ever created, second only to the original Half-Life (you just can't argue with that). Obviously I am not a PS3, shiny graphics, big-budget game whore, and my love for games remains firmly planted in the past. Well, I still love my Xbox, but I can't deny that old-school games like Donkey Kong, Doom, and Unreal Tournament were some of the best. Just for the record I'm 14.

[Mithral_Demon]

Being born at 1991 and playing Shareware at 4, it was intense, I got introduced this by my dads friend Tim which was a Doom and More disc back when I had '95, first gave me nightmares, but later I got hooked.
Why I chose playing Doom is for the replay and mod support, sure some of the graphic games can have fun, but they don;t have the Replaying style like Doom.

[myk]

I had already left my teens behind when I started playing DOOM and haven't retained a habit of playing previous childhood or teenage games, so the "I was young" factor can't be a determinant for sticking to the games.

Breadrobber said:
you just can't argue with that

Why not? I love DOOM and find Half-life boring :p

[Coraline]

myk said:
Why not? I love DOOM and find Half-life boring :p [/B]

Well said. I remember my dad was trying to get me all into Half-Life when it came out - didn't happen. I enjoy it now of course, but Doom has always been the compare-to choice for me, even after all of those years passed by...

Remember right before it came out? All the crazy hype about dialing into someone else far away to play a netgame...stellar shit.

[Breadrobber]

myk said:

Why not? I love DOOM and find Half-life boring :p

=O U-FIG! YOU MUST BE DESTROYED!

[EarthQuake]

When it comes to myself, I'm sort of middle ground in regards to age. I was seven or eight years old when I first played Doom, but there are many people who play Doom now that weren't even alive at the time it was released. Likewise, there are people who still play Doom who were twice as old I was when I first played. I don't really like to think that age is a factor when it comes to Doom. It is a timeless classic, that can appeal to anyone of any age. Do you think games like tetris, pong, or chess in some form or another will ever die out?

Nope, heh. Doom, just as those games, has joined the ranks and will probably never be forgotten.

[DuckReconMajor]

Doom lets you create the craziest environments and immerse yourself in them in a way none can match.

[Ultraboy94]

im 14 and have only been playing doom for just under a year.

there is something about doom that... makes me keep on playing. honestly most of the time im in the game even though i am of the new gaming era, where everything seems to be super-rendered and anything that still looks like it came from PS2 is shunned (especially since i live in the uk where it is now hard to even find games for the orignal XBOX), i am so immersed into the game that i completely forget that it is 16 years old (not that i would care anyway), and that the monsters/decorations/pickups are in fact completely flat.

also i believe doom has pretty much stopped some really stupid things i used to actually be scared of. before i played doom, i used to be scared of stuff like the startup sound on my old PS1 (seriously). when i started playing doom (i started with doom 64), i was rather scared of it (a year ago), but something still made me want to play. after a while, i was no longer scared of it, and now i am hardly scared of anything (my parents were suprised, as i went from being scared of a lot in a few months to watching all the alien movies without even being creeped once.).

yeah, most of my friends make fun of the fact that i play doom ("halo at least looks like a game" ive heard them say) but it dosent bother me. i play doom because there is something there that just makes it FUN, which sadly almost any new game seems to completely forget about and just tries to look pretty. after a while, i finally got my hands on a copy of a halo game, through so much peer pressure, and had a play. i am not doubting the fact that it is a good game, but it isnt great, and i still cant see the all hype behind it. i played them once and while they were a good experience, i havent picked them up since, while i went straight back to doom on the same day i got halo.

i have tried to get some of my friends into doom (one of them BACK into doom, they told me they played it before only a few years ago) but even with making stuff for it that they wanted to see, they still have no interest (and i almost peed myself laughing when one of them said that "doomguy ripped off mastercheif").

i also enjoy using stuff like slumped and doom builder 2 to make new things for the game. i find it fun to make levels and try making monsters and weapons using DECORATE, just to see how it turns out.
also since im starting GCSE next year and im doing ICT im hoping that the ACS and DECORATE stuff will possibly give me some "experience" doing basic programming. some levels i put up here or on WADHOST, others i make just for fun or to test things.

sorry if ive gone on too long, and i hope all of this is of any relavence.

[pavera]

Ultraboy94 said:

i used to be scared of stuff like the startup sound on my old PS1 (seriously).

I'm sorry but that's rather hilarious.

[Remmirath]

I play Doom because it's still fun.

Most of the games nowadays focus too much on graphics and not on gameplay, and that's not positive at all. Graphics are not everything in a game.
Doom has an old pixelated graphic, but at least i have fun when playing it.

[kristus]

I played Doom the first time when I was 13 or 14. I absolutely loved it. Me and my friend would do some crazy shit to get to computers capable of playing the game. (at first we didn't have any)

I would probably not have stuck to it though, had it not been for the simple fact that my mother couldn't afford to buy new computers every now and then. So I was stuck on a 486 until the end of spring 2000. Where I had managed to scrape together some monies and got myself a new computer on my own.

But by then, I had so much invested in Doom that it had become a large part of my life.

BTW; The graphics design of Doom is awesome. But it's not as advanced as modern games.

UT is a shitty game, they only playing Instagib CTF in that shit.
HL is boring and don't stack up to Doom.

My 2c :p

[pavera]

That's part of the reason I stuck with Doom for so long while all the cool kids were playing Counter-strike and other stuff..

I had a Pentium 90 all the way up until 2003, and the biggest game I could run was Starcraft, which barely ran by the end of its life. So I spent most of my time exploring all of Doom 2, and all of the levels I had on my D!Zone CD. Too bad I didn't have an internet connection, I could have learned the magic of /idgames.

[peterPROSTHETICS]

Ultraboy94 said:

sorry if ive gone on too long, and i hope all of this is of any relavence.

You story did not go to long......
I had fun reading it.

You good sir, have made my day.

Happy Dooming!

[abbeyb17]

As far as I can remember - I was playing Doom before I could read and write, (and talk properly, but then I was very nearly sent to speech counselling at 4 years old, so it doesn't really count). I played it with my real dad, but once he left he took doom with him so for quite a few years (until I was about 10 and got a computer in my room), I wasn't able to play doom. One of the very first things I did was find a shareware copy of doom, and although I didn't play it huge amounts, I played it.

Not so long ago, I got the full version of doom and I play it a fair amount. Most of the time now I map or go online but occasionaly when our internet goes down I'll fire up a single player game and have a play.

The reason for my return:
Because doom has a feel no other game can replicate.
it's fun, but difficult.
Theres always a new map to play thanks to the community.
And especially more recently, it's an awesome stress reliever.

I'll still play games that are made for the graphics, but only as long as they retain some gameplay. And I probably still play more doom.

And for the record, I'm a 14 year old girl, if it makes a difference.

[Stygian]

I'm only about 18, and I've been playing Doom since I was about 7 or so. My dad bought Ultimate Doom when it came out in 1995, so I spent a lot of time watching him and my older sister play. In the years following, I had lot of exposure to Duke3d and Chex Quest (got it in a box of corn Chex). It may be that I am just a spend-thrift and I don't want to buy new games, or it could be that newer games aren't as appealing to me as old PC and SNES era games.

[Mattfrie1]

It's a long story 2 part story (well sorta)...

A few years ago my gamecube broke during the summer (no surprise considering how much I used it) and I was "stuck" with my SNES and N64 until that x-mas. I figured I should get some new games for the systems and bought some pro wrestling games for the systems, and fell in love with my two oldest systems (that still haven't broken) again. (I am mostly a console gamer for the record)

Zip forward a few years when my interest for Mortal Kombat games started (it all links together, don't worry). Until then, I never played that many violent games with blood and gore in them. After doing some looking around on Wikipedia (yes, I found out about Doom from Wikipedia) for games of a similar nature, I fell into both Doom and Wolfenstein 3D and have played them ever since. That was all about a year ago as well. I currently own Doom for the PC (duh), SNES, N64, Saturn (I bought my Saturn for this), and the PSX (Which I like a lot more than the PC).

My friends always love to tease me about playing old video games ("Get a 360 already!", I hear this too much) so Doom is on their hitlist (And make comments like the ones listed in Ultraboy94's post).

I play Doom because you never can go though one map the same way. Being someone that plays the consoles more than PC, Every map is a new challenge, And you can't match the atmosphere created Doom either (Especially the PSX Doom's and Doom 64).

To sum it all up, it's just one hell of a game that can never be matched by any POS pretty graphic FPS you get these days.

And BTW, I'm only 15.

[AveryMaurice]

I have a 360 and still love Doom...

[Mattfrie1]

avery1555 said:

I have a 360 and still love Doom...

I don't have a problem with the 360, I might even get one some day, but most of my friends can't believe the newest system that I own is a PS2 and Gamecube.

[Maes]

Mattfrie1 said:

I don't have a problem with the 360, I might even get one some day, but most of my friends can't believe the newest system that I own is a PS2 and Gamecube.

My friends can't believe the most advanced console I own is a portable famiclone. Or my cell phone, if you count that as a games system ;-) And wait until I get that Gameking Pocket Dream Console, a system that will awake the AVGN in all of you ;-)