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Optimus

Things that you thought about Doom that weren't.

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DoomUK said:

My memory might be playing tricks on me here, but I'm sure PSX Doom's manual made the same mistake. Someone who owns a copy of PSX Doom would have to clarify it, parted company with mine about 10 years ago.


Sorry UK, the psx doom manual correctly said "Duration: One Level". Still, didn't stop me from thinking it was time based. Had to fish my old copy out for about 10 minutes for that answer.

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Before grabbing any of the Doom FAQs, I had my own intuition about monster "toughness" (hit points). The most incorrect one: pain elementals have more HP than cacodemons. No matter what weapon I used, it took ages to kill them (e.g. 3-4 SSG shots for a caco, at least 5 for a PE). Reading through the HP list was like "Oh, really? can't be true!"

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vdgg said:

Before grabbing any of the Doom FAQs, I had my own intuition about monster "toughness" (hit points). The most incorrect one: pain elementals have more HP than cacodemons. No matter what weapon I used, it took ages to kill them (e.g. 3-4 SSG shots for a caco, at least 5 for a PE). Reading through the HP list was like "Oh, really? can't be true!"

Lost Souls getting in the way. Or maybe the fact that their a nuisance while cacodemons are so much fun to kill.

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When I was 8 I wasn't able to reach the platform with the red key in Doom 2 map 02, so I've searched all my keyboard for a jump button...then I've realized there was a button for running. But this was discovered after many weeks, how weird!

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I thought Vanilla PWADs could contain sprite replacements (in the same way as they can contain textures and flats) until I read otherwise in a Hell to Pay thread recently.

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qoncept said:

Lost Souls getting in the way. Or maybe the fact that their a nuisance while cacodemons are so much fun to kill.


PE goes down pretty quick if you get up right in its face with a chaingun (or sometimes SSG, but the reload time is iffy). As soon as I see one, I make a mad dash towards it and start hacking... But if there are big monsters around (like barons) and you're low on ammo, it's useful to have the dumb lost souls around to bump into them. That gets boring, but it's better than having to punch barons (unless you're really good at that).

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I have some weird ones :)

-In the early days, I thought the blue floor texture at the beginning of E1M1 was a pit filled with water. I was aware of the proper water, I just thought it was yet another (simpler) way to depict water.

-In my early Doom days, I thought using cheatcodes was considered part of the official gameplay for the most part (mostly idclev to go to the level of my choosing).

-I started playing Doom on a friend's PC and would play from his savegames. He had a savegame of E2M8 with a BFG. The two of us tried killing the Cyberdemon for ages but we barely mananged it. It was only after I got my own PC, that I realized there was no way to obtain a BFG in episode 2 and my friend must have used the weapons cheat. :P

-I thought the grunting of roaming Imps was the bubbling of acid pits for a looong time.

-It took me a while to realize there were two different zombies in Doom: "Wait a minute...some have bald heads and some have green hair..."

-When I first played Doom2, somebody had turned gamma to maximum, so I thought that for Doom2 the designers had decided to make it a lot brighter. Took me some days to switch it off. :P

-For the above reason, it took me days of playing to realize the Hell Knight and the Baron of Hell were actually two different types of monster.

-I believed there was no way to beat Map30 in Doom2 without cheatcodes for quite some time. I had actually tried using the lift+RL but it didn't work for me and I wouldn't make another attempt for years!

There is probably more but this is all I can think of right now...

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I thought that I'm not mistaking cyberdemon's nostrils with his eyes until I saw an image of it with a yellow circle around nostrils. Then I finally noticed actual eyes.
Holy crap.

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hex11 said:

PE goes down pretty quick if you get up right in its face with a chaingun (or sometimes SSG, but the reload time is iffy). As soon as I see one, I make a mad dash towards it and start hacking... But if there are big monsters around (like barons) and you're low on ammo, it's useful to have the dumb lost souls around to bump into them. That gets boring, but it's better than having to punch barons (unless you're really good at that).

If I ever get low enough on ammo that I have to punch things I'm already miserable playing a map, so it wouldn't really matter what th eenemies are. IMO, a fun map will always at least have plenty of shells.

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Sometimes the map has enough ammo, but some of it is hidden, or you end up taking a suboptimal route, or you retreat to lick your wounds (pick up stimpaks you left behind) and some nasty monsters close in and end up between you and the ammo. That happened to me several times while playing verada.wad, because it's full of instant-surprise encounters with big baddies, and there's so very little time to react that it's easy to pick the wrong path, and get blocked in. Best choice then is to weaken them via infighting, and then try to run past the survivors, or go hand-to-hand.

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kmxexii said:

Darting in with a punch does more damage than just standing and flailing (I still do it though for mobility)

Also the swing shot thing



i totally believed these two. because darting towards the enemy in beat'em ups results usually in a different action, i believed this should be the same in doom. or maybe doomguy's forward velocity is added to his punch (hey, he's fast enough to hurt people by just running into them)

as for swing shots, this impression comes probably from their speed, you turn faster than you can see, but still, the shot is dead on and drops an enemy. there's even this page of empiric research over at doom2.net.

berserk lasting only as long the screen is red... it's quite easy to misunderstand that.

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I had a bunch of them as a kid that I was wrong about, and a lot of that I had no clue of.

For instance, I thought the way the Archvile attacked was 100% luck based whether it'd hit you or not. Since I didn't use cover a lot as a kid, I simply took the shot and saw the AV as more of an "unkillable" enemy.

Also thought the berserk pack ended when the red haze did. Thought mancubus shots were completely random. Thought the cyberdemon took splash damage from rockets. And the biggest one, due to E2M9, I thought that ONLY cacodemons and barons would infight with each other and no other monster. I have no idea why I kept this thought for so long, or when I realized I was wrong.

Oh, and I thought nightmare was impossible and no one seriously played it. And that the plasma gun was useless (compared to the BFG, before I learned more about stunning guys)

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Deathmatcher said:

-It took me a while to realize there were two different zombies in Doom: "Wait a minute...some have bald heads and some have green hair..."


The fact that one gave you just a pat on the buttwhile the other pumped you full of hot, manly, magnum buckshot didn't ring any bells? :-p

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@dobugabumaru, I never really understood the vile's attack for a long time either. Because..

For the longest time, I thought the only way to strafe was strafe+left/right. I didn't realize you could set up a single key to do it. Until this year I played with the standard controls. Left pinkie on ctrl to shoot, left ring finger holding shift down at all times to run, and left thumb moving back and forth between alt to strafe and space to open doors.

I did get better but for a long time "taking cover" and "dodging" in my vocabulary. It's no wonder I sucked.

And for whatever reason, when it actually comes up, I "forget" that you can just dodge a charging lost soul. I never do. I'll back up and hope I can shoot in time but I never dodge them.

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Maes said:

The fact that one gave you just a pat on the buttwhile the other pumped you full of hot, manly, magnum buckshot didn't ring any bells? :-p


I am with deathmatcher on this. It took me a looooong time to notice there were 2 types of zombies also.

The fact that the damage was so different, I just took that as a large damage spread for the 'single' zombie type.

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For me the different types of zombies were obvious due to what they drop, but I believed they had different roar sounds when they see you (The softer sound belonging to the riflemen, and the more animalistic ones belonging to shotgunners. I had no Doom2 at that time).

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Z86 said:

The softer sound belonging to the riflemen, and the more animalistic ones belonging to shotgunners.


I noticed that too...shotgunners are more likely to make aggressive moans, maybe because the shotgunners are obviouslly toppin' in the zombie hierarchy? ;-)

Though the chubbies in Doom II would dispute that...

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hex11 said:

PE goes down pretty quick if you get up right in its face with a chaingun (or sometimes SSG, but the reload time is iffy). As soon as I see one, I make a mad dash towards it and start hacking... But if there are big monsters around (like barons) and you're low on ammo, it's useful to have the dumb lost souls around to bump into them. That gets boring, but it's better than having to punch barons (unless you're really good at that).


If you get right up in his face, the reload time is of no concern. At least in the original engine, the PE can't spit lost souls when you're right up next to it. You can SSG/chainsaw or even punch it to death without berserk if you want, as long as it's the only monster around.

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I had a couple of misconceptions about Doom in my n00b days:

1. When I first played Doom, I didn't know it wasn't possible to jump in the game. My friend didn't know either, and the two of us spent several minutes trying to find the "jump" key.
2. During that same session, we thought the way to open doors was to shoot them. D'oh!
3. Back when shovelware CDs were still common, I once saw one that offered 2,000 new levels for Doom. I wasn't aware of how loading custom WADs worked at the time, so I thought the product would actually modify Doom and add 2,000 levels to the game. I remember thinking, "if idclev## only allows two digits, then how am I going to select levels beyond the ninth episode?"
4. Speaking of #3, I didn't know that the majority of those levels were downloaded from the Internet. I thought, "designing those levels must have taken this company a VERY long time..." Good times, good times.

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In Entryway in Doom II I never knew there was a secret that would allow you outside. (this was way back in the 90's)
-I only thought the Beserk pack lasted for a limited amount of time and not the entire level

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I thought Sandy Petersen was bad with texture alignment. Looking through his Doom 1 stuff, that definitely isn't the case. I've mentioned it before, but look at the outside area of E3M4 with the SKINLOW walls. The guy doesn't get the credit he deserves for things like that.

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ixfd64 said:

I had a couple of misconceptions about Doom in my n00b days:

1. When I first played Doom, I didn't know it wasn't possible to jump in the game. My friend didn't know either, and the two of us spent several minutes trying to find the "jump" key.
2. During that same session, we thought the way to open doors was to shoot them. D'oh!
3. Back when shovelware CDs were still common, I once saw one that offered 2,000 new levels for Doom. I wasn't aware of how loading custom WADs worked at the time, so I thought the product would actually modify Doom and add 2,000 levels to the game. I remember thinking, "if idclev## only allows two digits, then how am I going to select levels beyond the ninth episode?"
4. Speaking of #3, I didn't know that the majority of those levels were downloaded from the Internet. I thought, "designing those levels must have taken this company a VERY long time..." Good times, good times.


This post made me laugh.

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I thought Partial Invisibility actually did sod all (apart from making you transparent). I was kinda right...

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I thought that the heavy breathing sounds that zombies make came from Doomguy after you sprinted around a lot.

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Early on I thought the SS Nazis said "I'm leaving!" when they died.

Optimus said:
I am just wondering now and never thought before, what was the meaning of the word "stimpack"? Stimulation pack or something? Like a painkiller?

The id guys played D&D, and an early TSR role-playing game, Start Frontiers, had an item called a stimdose. Perhaps they were familiar with that game and got the idea from there. When I started playing DOOM, I knew about it, so I didn't feel "stimpack" was unusual. In fact, in the 0.4 alpha of DOOM, the "stim" item looks like a syringe, or much more like the item in Star Frontiers. But it's evident it didn't look good in the game, so they changed it to a small medical kit with "pack" as part of the name.

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Not really related to anything in-game as such, but the back of the box for Saturn Doom LIED to me -- the screenshots were clearly from the PC version (and all of them are Final Doom maps at that), but at the time I thought it would be yet another unique enough port to play around with, using a mix of maps from all four IWADs.

...

Nope, it was just what PSX Doom would be like if it was complete and utter shit. All I ended up liking about it was the shiny new STBAR.

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Just remembered this one:
Back in my days of playing SNES Doom, I thought the Rocket Launcher was a flame round launcher of sorts shooting fireballs like that of Imps (or aliens as I thought them to be).

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Slippy_Pig said:

I thought Partial Invisibility made it so that you could sneak around everything...

On the SNES version, it did do that. At least, you could sneak around anything that wasn't already on alert before you picked up the PI.

As soon as you fired a shot though monsters could see you and would shoot with perfect aim, despite your weapon showing that you still had the powerup.

When I found out years later how PI behaved on PC I always figured the random aiming must have been too complicated for the SNES to handle. Although knowing now how simple the random aiming actually is that doesn't make much sense.

Makes me wonder why they changed that on SNES.

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