things about Doom that bug or puzzle you?

[BaronOfStuff]

Patrol1985 said:

Speaking of mancubi shooting through walls on map07 ... I assume that mancubi can also shoot through walls in vanilla Doom 2?

Yep, and IIRC it can also happen in the earlier console ports (Saturn/PlayStation). One of the biggest "wtf" moments in the game.

[MajorRawne]

I'll start a thread at some point so we can discuss the merits of PC versus PSX Doom.

I always thought Mancubus attacks had a small blast radius, or that if any part of the "explosion" touches you - for example if standing just around a corner and the sprite comes through the wall at you - it counts as a "minor" hit. The Doom Wiki does explain this bug though.

[NiuHaka]

Light Amplification Visor. Worst eye sore in the game. I have quit playing numerous times when being forced to grab it. It is the only thing in doom that I hate.

[Hellbent]

are you implying you hate halls of the damned!?!?!!?

[Foxpup]

NiuHaka said:

Light Amplification Visor. Worst eye sore in the game. I have quit playing numerous times when being forced to grab it. It is the only thing in doom that I hate.

You know you can just use the IDBEHOLD cheat to turn it off if you prefer to fight in the dark. Which also works for all powerups except the computer map: once you get a computer map on a level, you can't get rid of it by any means, which is rather annoying because you can't pick up another one if you've already got one, and it counts as item, which means if there's more than one computer map on a level, it's impossible to get 100% items.

Also annoying is the screen flashing when a powerup is about to run out. It's okay when it's a radiation suit; not so much when it's invulnerability. This must be why games now come with epilepsy warnings.

[savagegrant]

What bugs me the most is having to scrounge up enough free memory just to play the game. All this piss-farting around with changes to my autoexec.bat and config.sys files. TSRs, EMS memory, XMS memory, DOS/4G error messages...arrrggghhh! Why won't you just bloody load! - Me circa 1994 ;)

[valhallaist]

Brown/sand coloured textures. You know, that ones that plagued Doom II all the way through. Wow, were the designers colour blind? I know it's set on Earth, but that's truly no excuse.

[savagegrant]

valhallaist said:

Brown/sand coloured textures. You know, that ones that plagued Doom II all the way through.

What about Quake 1 then? I think of it as the game that's coloured with different shades of shit. lol

[NiuHaka]

Hellbent said:

are you implying you hate halls of the damned!?!?!!?

No, I don't hate Halls of the Damned. I usually just grin and bare it especially when i'm playing vanilla doom. However, idbeholdl is my most used cheat. The "quit numerous times when being forced to grab it" usually applies to anything other than vanilla. It would be completely forgivable if everything looked green or some other added effect but i just hate the look of it when all depth is lost. I wouldn't mind it so much if all the light was kicked up twenty points or so. I'm just picky like that with visual mumbo-jumbo.

[joe-ilya]

It bugs me that the wall behind the spawn under the gate is untextured in D2(MAP01) I know you're not supposed to see it but it just bugs me that there's actual HOM in MAP01.

[40oz]

There's code in Doom somewhere that checks if your supershotgun has ammo before it reloads and switches to the next available weapon. I know it has worked in the past, where I would fire the super shotgun to 0 shells, then lower it before completing the reload sequence, but recently a few times slipped by where I had unsuspectingly used up all my ammo, completed the reload sequence, and then lowered the supershotgun to switch a different weapon. I haven't yet taken the time to test what has been wrong, but recently I've played Doom 2 with a supershotgun, and still reloading it after the final shot. Now that I'm posting this I'm going to go play Doom now and find out.

[MajorRawne]

I didn't like Halls of the Damned when I first played it, but fell in love with it one winter morning. They'd closed our school due to severe snow and my friend walked to my house early in the morning while I was playing Halls of the Damned (guess which Doom port I was playing). As I was showing him the level, I realised the drab greys were actually quite bright and complemented the snow out in the real world. Everything about the map - its open, expansive nature, its brightness and the eerie Aubrey Hodges theme - suddenly made sense.

Things that bug: the chaingun being totally useless in Deathmatch. I think I killed one person with it once over the years we played Doom and he was completely crap at it anyway. It was funny sniping at people from long distances on Sever the Wicked and they'd be shouting "Where are you? Where are you?"

[NiuHaka]

Actually, I take it back. There are too many visors on that map. I hate it. Stupid visors!

[Avoozl]

I really can't see how they're that bad.

[Deleted_Account]

I like the Light Amplification Visors, they let you see in the dark.

[Job]

NiuHaka said:

Actually, I take it back. There are too many visors on that map. I hate it. Stupid visors!

Avoozl said:

I really can't see how they're that bad.

I see what you did there.

[Avoozl]

Job said:

I see what you did there.

That actually wasn't intentional.

[CRAZY_ENZO]

Job said:

I see what you did there.

I guess I could say I see it in this post too.

[FTM]

darknation said:

it's possible the berserk powerup was only meant to last a set amount of time in the planning stages, much like the rad suit. It would explain the red screen that slowly fades.

Whereas a chainsaw is for life, not just for christmas.

AFAIK the red scrren is supposed to be a pain immunity, and i think i've read somewhere that they decided to make it fade because it would be annoying to have the red screen the rest of the level.

[PRIMEVAL]

Can't say it really bugs me, but it does sorta itch at the subtle OCD in me, but I've noticed in Doom 1 that when playing Episode 1, you see gray mountains outside but brown mountains on the intermission screen. And it's just the opposite with Episode 2 sky / intermission screen.

[Gez]

The MUS format. I wish it had never existed, and instead Doom had always supported true MIDI natively.

[scifista42]

MajorRawne said:

Things that bug: the chaingun being totally useless in Deathmatch.

I don't think so. In E1M2, the outdoor secret area with a chaingun and a soulsphere, the chaingun is actually ideal choice. Spamming rockets won't help you much if your opponent can outstrafe them, and a skilled player can make well-timed unpredictable turns in order to avoid shotgun. Chaingun is the weapon that brings you victory there if you can keep constantly aiming at your opponent. For the same reason, I often find the basic machinegun in Quake 3 Arena to be useful too.

What irks me? The unintuitive city levels, with odd aesthetics and where it's often easier to find secrets than the right path, or even the secrets are mandatory. Downtown, Industrial Zone, The Courtyard and specially The Citadel were quite annoying to find a way through for the first time. (Why, why, why do I have to reach most secrets or glide past torches in order to exit Citadel?)

[killer2]

I like The Citadel a lot. I loved the secret aspect of it, and I think it's the last Doom2 level for me to discover a lot of secrets that I didn't know it had during my childhood. I never had trouble exiting it tho, yellow and red keys are easy to find.
On the other hand, the shootable walls on The Spirit World are illogical.

[Hellbent]

Using melee weapon on my macbook pro keyboard is extremely difficult for some reason. It's difficult to actually get close enough that the fist or chainsaw are making contact. Don't have this problem when using a mouse on a PC. Mac mouse handling is horrible, too :( ggrrrr

[daedrahj]

Don't know if this has been mentioned or not, but what about tricks and traps, Doom 2. Fantastic level, but the last door before the exit might annoy you if you haven't saved it, you fall off and the platforms have sunk the bottom.

[Pirx]

Antroid said:

Can't agree here at all. I think most of Doom 2's music as well as Doom 1's is awesome. The only few tracks I don't care for are map02's, map04's and perhaps map08's. The rest are mostly pretty great. I mean, the text intermission, map03, 05, 07, 09, 10, 18, 20, 28... All very cool songs. I can't imagine Doom 2 having nearly the same atmosphere if it had a Hodges soundtrack. Same for Doom 1. In my books that only fits Doom 64. I mean, people like PSX Doom and all, but to me it's just all wrong... Perhaps you could say that the existence of PSX Doom the way it is really bugs me.

funny how my taste in music is * exactly * the same, including the ones i don't care about. 03 and 05 are dark and foreboding, i like humming its music while i play. 07 just oozes violence, 18 is surreal, 28 perhaps the best, how you're climbing to the end of that cave and the music is rising too. bobby prince's tracks are action-oriented, while those by aubrey hodges seem more geared towards horror.


just listening to this... just let it play:

[bradharding]

As the developer of doomretro.com]DOOM RETRO, this thread interests me greatly. What things about DOOM "bug or puzzle you" that people would like to see "fixed" in a source port, and how? I'm always looking for new ideas on how I can improve my port...

[Antroid]

Pirx said:

03 and 05 are dark and foreboding

I feel 03 is more mischievous, mocking and taunting. It was a great track for the first map of Hell in Doom 2, in which Hell returned more insane than ever before.

You also didn't mention 20, and I absolutely adore that track, it's mood is resigned and almost hopeless, but not quite.

[killer2]

Antroid said:

You also didn't mention 20, and I absolutely adore that track, it's mood is resigned and almost hopeless, but not quite.

I agree. That track is the tits! Definitely the best in the whole Doom series, in my opinion (along with Agony Rhapsody, Suspense, and that one from E1M8).

[Avoozl]

I think I like the track used in E2M6/E4M7 the most when it comes to the hellish music out of both of the original Doom's.