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DoomUK

The nostalgic value of Doom

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How many of you play Doom in 2013 partly (or wholly) for the nostalgic experience it offers?

Playing Doom reminds me of my youth, and this has some influence on why I enjoy playing it nearly 20 years later. Even if I'm playing a WAD that the community has recently devised, I'm transported back to the mid-90's; simpler times of my life when weekends were all about playing games with my best friend, with little else to think or care about. Not to mention that the game itself is emblematic of a time when games - particularly FPSs - weren't vomited out for the sole purpose of making a shitload of money, with little to no artistry or soul behind them.

This isn't to say that Doom is otherwise irrelevant, or that I wouldn't fucking love it if I hadn't grown up with it. If it attracts new, younger players in 2013 then it obviously has an appeal that's more tangible than nostalgia. I'm just saying, I wear my nostalgia goggles without shame.

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I can't say I have any real nostalgia for Doom, or many games for that matter. I play plenty of old games still, but only because they're good games. There have been a few games I had pretty good memories of, but found disappointing or outright annoying when I went back to them.

With Doom, I played Doom 2 on the PC once, got it on the PlayStation and played it a bit until that copy was stolen from me, then I promptly forgot about it for about five or so years before picking it up for the PC. Since getting it for the PC I've been playing it fairly regularly, especially since I started lurking here (probably a year, maybe two before I registered).

Although I do feel a touch of nostalgia in three particular areas of the IWADs: The starting area of E1M3, the semi-outside area with jump to the brown building in Doom 2 MAP02, and the starting area of MAP04 with the crusher shutters. These areas were the only ones I really remembered from PSX Doom (I never got very far in either game, and never played it enough to really remember any of the levels) when I picked up the PC version.

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Although I agree it does help that Doom is a great game in itself, there will always be a part of me that likes Doom particularly for the nostalgia; bringing back memories of living on a farm, riding bikes and frolicking in the paddocks by day, and dooming (excessive god-moding too) by night.

And I can't be the only schoolkid who hummed all the levels music and played the 'what Plutonia/TNT level has that music?' game. Good times..

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I still play Doom because modern FPSs have gone in a direction I don't like. Doom did the right thing when it ignored all issues about 'realism' and focussed on making the game fun to play.

The more realistic modern games got the more boring they also got. The last one I thoroughly enjoyed was Jedi Outcast back in 2002. But what makes Doom live on is just the massive amount of user created content. I can play the game for more than two years and never replay a level in that time.

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I play Doom now because in 1994 I was dimly aware of the manic rush to BBSes and the web it inspired and since then I've considered it the only real game. >:3

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I only see Doom as nostalgic when I play to 'explore' the levels and see parts of it I usually skip in my natural semi-speedrun way of playing.

The way I see it, Doom is FPS near-perfection. It may have some balance issues (I'm very vocal about the uselessness of the pistol and how I like to see at least some play with the weapon before it's replaced by something better -- which is basically anything), but the identities of all the enemies and their attributes; plus all the other non-pistol weapons; make it a stellar game with a lot of potential that maybe wasn't explored in the IWAD games.

But that's cool, because of that continuous stream of user-made content.

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For regular play, no, not at all.

I've been playing DOOM with source-ports more or less since their inception, and as they've gradually evolved, allowing for hi-res display modes, and other bells and whistles, the experience has become, by quite small increments, increasingly removed from my experience of playing vanilla DOOM in '94, to the point where (for me) the two are fundamentally unalike. This is not a complaint; it's just that, as such, my day-to-day experience of playing new maps (or at least, maps that I didn't play back then) via source ports, lacks any element of nostalgia.

But occasionally I want a nostalgia trip, and - if so - I play vanilla via DOS-box, but only the IWAD maps, or maps from that period. It has to be DOS-box, rather than choco-DOOM, because I want to see that "THIS IS NOT SHAREWARE" loading screen. I don't do this very often though (maybe once a year) lest, with regular contact, it lose its nostalgic edge. This is actually a nice thing about the early emergence of source ports, since if I'd been regularly playing vanilla DOOM for the past 20 years, I doubt it would feel very nostalgic to play it now.

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No nostalgy here.

Much like durian, the Doom I play now and the Doom I played then are so different they might as well be different games.

At that point in my life the game wasn't that big of a deal either.

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For nostalgia more sourceports should warn me when I'm loading a PWAD, that "this version of Doom has been modified". Never got old.

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I don't have nostalgia for Doom itself, only for some wads. For example Invasion UAC, which was one of the first wads I played a lot in ZDaemon. Also Tree 3, which was one of the first wads I got with the random function on /idgames. These are very special to me and I enjoy them a lot more than many wads that I think are better.

Right now I'm playing sg_trogun coop a lot and I do feel nostalgia because it really reminds me of playing Invasion UAC for the first time.

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I play old games because they're good games. Granted, I grew up with Dark Forces and Dark Forces II (And in Dark Forces' case, if Dark XL was 110% functional and ready I'd be playing that more than Doom), so in truth I do feel some nostalgia once in a while when playing other games from that time. I don't think it's a feeling you can necessarily control.

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One thing I've found is that you don't have to play a game when it came out to enjoy it, when I first acquired Blood in 2010/2011 I found it fun though it started to get a bit boring when I got up to the second last map of the first episode, but in a few weeks the game grew on me and I came to liking it.

Looking back I find it hard to believe I'm enjoying ancient pc games such as Doom after experiencing gaming on my GameCube back in 02 to 04, and pc gaming from 04 to 07 before I got doom in 08.

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I think I first properly played Doom when I bought the Maximum Doom collection, and had to use the Doom95.exe launcher to play it.

I don't play Doom because of the nostalgia factor at all though; I play Doom because there's lots of great wads for me to play through with excellent gameplay to them! Plus classic Doom is a great game in general, which is worth playing in its own right.

My only regret is that I didn't start playing Doom wads much earlier, outside of ZDaemon sessions a few years back.

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I try to chase the nostalgia I felt in E2 on the PC version and the PSX conversion made available. After trying to play my original long box copy of Doom on my PS2, I found it almost unplayable due to the frame rate. At least I can play it on the accelerated graphics of my PC (though I try to de-tune the graphics for authenticity) but I find it loses some of the character of the console version.

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Yes, Doom has a very high nostalgic value for me. I was 10 when it came out and I remember spending hours exploring those levels. And today, when I play through E1 for example, I remember those good old days. Oh, the 90's! Cassettes, VHS, Diskettes and Doom. Who needs CoD or a fucking iPhone?

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The nostalgic value of Doom is completely lost on me because of the fact that I have played it throughout my life. It's like breathing air, you did it as a kid, but that doesn't mean you really miss it.

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durian said:

I've been playing DOOM with source-ports more or less since their inception, and as they've gradually evolved, allowing for hi-res display modes, and other bells and whistles, the experience has become, by quite small increments, increasingly removed from my experience of playing vanilla DOOM in '94, to the point where (for me) the two are fundamentally unalike.

Interesting. Doomsday is my go-to source port (unless something else is absolutely necessary), and I make use of all its niceties minus the 3D models*. Fundamentally, it still feels like Doom circa 1993; polished, crisper, cosmetically prettier, but the exact same game. Even turning freelook and crosshairs on doesn't really influence the nature of the game, for me.

*Which DO make it feel very different, cosmetically, which is why I don't use them. I also think they look awful, but that's another discussion for another time.

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Doom has certain nostalgic values for me. It opens memories from the past while playing and it is always soothing to return to it.

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The only real nostalgic value apart from Doom 95, is my brother was a genius and somehow found a full copy of Doom II on some obscure site around 2000 whilst still on Dial-up, because we literally couldn't find it anywhere at any stores because the UK sucks at stocking Retro Games. I'm sure Ebay and Amazon didn't exist then either.

I also saw my first encounter with a source port in PC Gamer called 'Doomsday'.

I saw 'The Depths of Doom Trilogy' once in PC World when I was very young but I don't think my parents would let me buy it because I already had a full boxed copy of Ultimate Doom.

Very rare but I found both Duke Carribean and Nuclear Winter stiched together once in same store for bargain.

Fuck PC World to the ninth circle of hell, bunch of overpriced pirate con artist bastards. Thank god for Aria PC.

My first PC was Windows 95 so woah not much memories of DOS.

Jesus Christ what the hell happened to Mobygames, just ruined the entire layout.

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For me, Doom has a nostalgic value only when I play it in black and white and with PC speaker sounds. Brings back sweet memories of being a 3 year old child and trying to explain my Spiderdemon drawing to my kindergarten teacher, or confusing the other kids by saying words like "automap" and "iddqd".

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I don't always play Doom, but when I do, it's almost purely for the sake of a much needed nostalgia trip.

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Alot of nostalgia is involved for me, BUT, it's not nostalgia from when I played the game in the mid nineties, nope. Its actually nostalgia from around 2000-2002, when I and a couple of friends rediscovered Doom and found out about pwads. Such good times. Geeky times, but good times.

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I still get very nostalgic when I play the original Doom with OPL music, especially on E1M7/E2M5/E3M5. Just hearing that song in that nature makes me fondly remember watching my dad play the game when I was around 3-4 and hearing that same music. I also get pretty nostalgic when I do certain wad combinations that I did back in 2000 when I first really started playing Doom 2 again and my dad put a bunch of wads on a disc for me to try. Playing with PC speaker will always remind me of when my friend didn't have speakers at his house and we had to use it to get any kind of sound. Fun times.

However, having been with it so long, I still believe it has a lot to offer even without nostalgia. It's a fun and fast action-packed game, and despite being relatively primitive, I can't stop coming back to it year after year. I have, however, found the game more frustrating over time, usually in regards to my luck with the RNG - something I don't really remember being bothered by back in my formative years of playing Doom. That's confirmation bias for you, I guess. Either way, I both have nostalgic and non-nostalgic experiences with Doom, depending on what I play and how I play it.

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the excitement and novelty kinda peters out but happy memories and the appreciation of what used to be keeps it going...

lol

one of my first crushes was my neighbor who would let me play doom on her dads computer! she moved but doom stayed! doom probably held up better.

we had a mac at home and i dont know if any of you recall but mac version ended up being delayed for a while i can remember coming home ever day after school for literally 6+ months looking for a box on the porch. talk about hell.

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