All these years later there's still nothing better than Doom

[glenzinho]

A good article on the appeal of Doom after all these years.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/03/all-these-years-later-there%E2%80%99s-still-nothing-better-doom

[Phml]

Excellent writeup. You can tell the guy gets the game. Makes me want to check out more of his stuff.

[tourniquet]

Yeah he knows what he's talking about. I really enjoyed reading this.

[40oz]

Pretty enlightening. Sometimes you kinda forget how small a role shooting monsters takes in doom. The shooting pretty much requires the least precision of all of its game play elements.

[Joshua Schäferhund]

This man deserves extra props for not mentioning Brutal Doom.

[Koko Ricky]

Great article. The writer barely mentioned the non-linear tendencies of the maps and instead reminded the reader that Doom's sense of movement is actually more integral than its shooting mechanics. I've been playing Unholy Realms lately, and I love that in each in every map, I can either carefully take down every enemy one by one, initiate a clusterfuck of infighting, spend a good chunk of the map dodging, or all three, to varying degrees. The ability to do this while simultaneously being given access to various paths is something of a lost art. It seemed like after Doom and Quake, the Build era games kept this approach alive, and then somewhere in the 2000s it died off.

[purist]

Another two reasons are that advances in technology for FPS games makes it harder to make level replacement mods and display many enemies on screen at once.

[Xegethra]

Patch93 said:

This man deserves extra props for not mentioning Brutal Doom.

Well, you wouldn't necessarily when talking about the original...he didn't even mention other mods at all.

But I dunno about the whole article though, while Doom is fun and will always be an incredibly fun game...other old games, at least to me are still loads of fun, I still play them, I've never really stopped. I think at that point he got stuck into his own personal opinion about other old games fading lots over the years....but this is always gonna be different for other people.

I do still agree that Doom is probably one of, if not the best FPS out there, but other FPS games are still decent and well made, not all of them want to be a Doom clone and fail at it. Some wanna try other things, this may work, it may not but even so while I don't see myself coming back to them as often as I do Doom, that still doesn't mean they are entirely bad.

[Doomkid]

I really would like a game that hits the same spot as Doom did (does), but since no such thing exists, I like the other non-Doomy stuff like Farcry 3, or even Portal and Portal 2, since they aren't trying to be Doom all over again. They're fun in a far less "classic" way than Doom, though I will admit in 10 years I'll probably still be playing Doom, and maybe not those games. Doom is my favorite game of all time if I had to pick just one.

Street Fighter 2 is a tiny bit older than Doom, yet I feel it's still the best fighting game by miles and hasn't really aged at all. Like Doom, the control is ultra-fluid and any gamer of any age can pick it up and play, and yet hours of devotion will make you exponentially better. These games have an insanely high skill cap which adds so much replayablility.

Smash Bros. Melee is my pick if we're talking 4 players/a more 'party game' feel. Brawl went over the top in the wrong direction whereas Melee improved all the good stuff in the N64 version. My point is, sequels generally tend to start sucking after the second installment. Not sure why, but it's a fairly common trend.

Anyways, this article is awesome and a really good read. Doom has aged like the finest wine.

[MajorRawne]

Good article.

I had so much fun playing Modern Warfare 2's special missions with my best friend, but I would have dropped it immediately for the chance to play a PSX Doom co-op instead. There is no contest whatsoever. I choose Aubrey Hodges over Hans Zimmer in this case. I choose relentless, fast-paced action over stepping around a corner to kill another three baddies, or hiding behind a crate til my screen stops being red.

Oh, and I think Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 9 are light-years ahead of all the later versions in terms of content and adventure. FFX seemed all but crippled after the sprawling epic of FFIX, nothing but palette-swapped enemies and cheesy music. 7 had grit, humour and the most amazing soundtrack. 9 was its colourful, funny and extremely well-written counterpart. FFXIII is just a corridor with characters who just never came alive for me.

[doomgargoyle]

Isnt his entire point that doom's uniqueness is because it's unrealistic? Going around in circles around enemies, backtracking as fast as you move forward and such isnt realistic at all, which is what modern fps's are trying to do. DOOM is more or less robotron in 3d. I think too that Duke3d is Doom done better. It does everything doom did and improved on it. And then Blood did everything Duke3d did and improved on that. :D

[Maes]

doomgargoyle said:

Duke3D does everything doom did and improved on it.

Perhaps it improved on it a bit too much ;-)

[Da Werecat]

[Gez]

doomgargoyle said:

I think too that Duke3d is Doom done better. It does everything doom did and improved on it. And then Blood did everything Duke3d did and improved on that. :D

And then Shadow Warrior had the most advanced engine of the Build games. You've probably already seen this video:

And yet. These Build games, despite their assets, weren't as fun as Doom.

[doomgargoyle]

To each their own. They both are fun. It could be that i need to play more doom wads.

[doomgargoyle]

Da Werecat said:

:D

[drifter20k]

Good article. Can't wait to get off of work and play DOOM now!

[joe-ilya]

Rode the whole article and had fun reading how doom's gameplay is different and funner then the others.

[Clonehunter]

Gez said:

And yet. These Build games, despite their assets, weren't as fun as Doom.

I'd actually probably put Doom and Duke 3D (And in truth Shadow Warrior and Blood, although the latter is more of a taste thing) all on about the same line. The thing with Doom is that it has a great modding community that helps the game remain fresh in the long run. There's mods for the other games too, but not in Doom's capacity.

[Doomkid]

Da Werecat said:

best picture ever

Holy shit, that's gold.. I love Duke, but it sure ain't doom.

[Xegethra]

doomgargoyle said:

To each their own. They both are fun. It could be that i need to play more doom wads.

This is something that comes into it a lot, a good bit of personal preference. Somebody might love something for their respective reasons, but not everyone will think the same way. Fun is a whole lot of subjective.

I dunno, Doom is still a great game but unlike the author of the article, I don't discount all other retro games as being badly aged either.

[Doomkid]

Xegethra said:

unlike the author of the article, I don't discount all other retro games as being badly aged either.

I agree with this big time. As one of many examples, smb1 was not made obsolete when Super Mario World came out, even though SMW has better visuals and more content. They still feel like unique and equally enjoyable games.

[Xegethra]

Indeed.

I'm still playing the likes of many things, I'Robot, Juno First, Sonic, Streets of Rage, GTA 1, GTA 2, Ridge Racer, Road Rash, Loaded, Defender, Sims 1, Several Mickey Mouse games, Global Gladiators, Cool Spot, Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Hyperchase and so on and on....

I think it just comes down to people's ability to play old games. I remember when GTA 4 came out people complained on the Gamefaqs forum that they could no longer "get used to" playing the GTA 3 era games.

Which makes no sense to me, how people can be so like that. It's just an older game....it's not like GTA 3 was the clunkiest game ever to be made yet people had a hard time going back to it.

Old games, Doom or otherwise, are largely still playable today, of course there are exceptions with badly made or crude games but in general retro gaming is still easy to do and games are still very much enjoyable to this day. This strange intolerant attitude towards them people have is beyond me, they don't even try to give things chance half the time.

But it's all opinion, if they don't like the older games, they don't like them, can't do much about that, personal taste and sometimes for valid reasons. There are some retro games I don't like too...it just baffles me when they say they haven't aged well and they are all unplayable.

[Blastfrog]

Xegethra said:

I think it just comes down to people's ability to play old games. I remember when GTA 4 came out people complained on the Gamefaqs forum that they could no longer "get used to" playing the GTA 3 era games.

Which makes no sense to me, how people can be so like that. It's just an older game....it's not like GTA 3 was the clunkiest game ever to be made yet people had a hard time going back to it.

I don't get it either. Hell, if anything, I find GTA 4 to be clunky and hard to get into. I tried it once and just hated the controls. In an attempt to get it looking all "cinematic," the mouse movement is filtered through some kind of smooth sweeping motion like the kind you see when Hollywood movies pan the camera dramatically. Just give me 1:1 control, dammit! I don't mind that it looks un-movie like, it feels better to play. The actual player movement takes a whole freaking second to gain full speed, and to stop. The cars are quite the same way. Everything about the controls feel like I'm pushing a heavy rock up a steep incline.

"Cinematics" in general are GTA 4's problem. In GTA 3 era, the cutscenes were primarily there for telling you the mission objectives, with world-building aesthetics as a secondary purpose. The missions were there to set up specific scenarios in which to exploit the emergent gameplay properties of the sandbox in specific ways. Now, the cutscenes are trying to be the Godfather, with the missions themselves being far more like scripted Hollywood action scenes than anything specifically meant for the exploitation of emergent gameplay.

Yeah, the GTA 3 era games have that ugly washed out, low world detail early PS2 era graphics, but dammit, they were trying to be Grand Theft Auto, not The Godfather.

Xegethra said:

Old games, Doom or otherwise, are largely still playable today, of course there are exceptions with badly made or crude games but in general retro gaming is still easy to do and games are still very much enjoyable to this day. This strange intolerant attitude towards them people have is beyond me, they don't even try to give things chance half the time.

I tried to get my (at the time) 12 year old CoD-playing cousin to play Doom. He was literally unable to find the red keycard in E1M2, let alone the door to the stairs leading to it. He kept asking me where the objective markers were. I hate him (for many other reasons, that's just a small part of it).

[40oz]

Doomkid92 said:

I agree with this big time. As one of many examples, smb1 was not made obsolete when Super Mario World came out, even though SMW has better visuals and more content. They still feel like unique and equally enjoyable games.

I don't know, my wife and I have been playing a lot of "New Super Mario Bros." on the Nintendo Wii and after beating it we decided to get an emulated copy of Super Mario World for SNES on the same platform and we had a really hard time adapting. We got so accustomed to things like kick jumping off walls and floor pounds and the general gravity, speed, and jump height of the characters that going backwads was a really difficult transition. We didn't get more than a couple levels into it before we were ready to play through Nsmb again.

[Belial]

Xegethra said:

I think it just comes down to people's ability to play old games. I remember when GTA 4 came out people complained on the Gamefaqs forum that they could no longer "get used to" playing the GTA 3 era games.

For me it's VC and SA that make GTA 3 obsolete, not GTA 4.

[scifista42]

Great article. I agree with the writer's opinion expressed in the last five paragraphs (heh) where he talks about how Doom excels in providing a fun experience, over the modern shooters. I also hope that future shooters will improve in that regard. Then I'd start to be interested in them more. Currently, in my gaming life, I quite well get along mostly (not only) just with Doom and its countless great mods, or similar alternatives of games. Yes, I also believe that "All these years later, there’s still nothing better than Doom".

[Gez]

40oz said:

I don't know, my wife and I have been playing a lot of "New Super Mario Bros." on the Nintendo Wii and after beating it we decided to get an emulated copy of Super Mario World for SNES on the same platform and we had a really hard time adapting. We got so accustomed to things like kick jumping off walls and floor pounds and the general gravity, speed, and jump height of the characters that going backwads was a really difficult transition. We didn't get more than a couple levels into it before we were ready to play through Nsmb again.

It's kind of like going back to Doom without mouse aim and jumping.

[Xegethra]

Gez said:

It's kind of like going back to Doom without mouse aim and jumping.

Which is still easy to do, as I play it on the PSX still....

Still don't get why people can't reverse engineer themselves to play older things though...so it's a bit less features and handling? Don't get why that's ever a problem.

Belial said:

For me it's VC and SA that make GTA 3 obsolete, not GTA 4.

GTA 3 is still my favourite third person GTA..and GTA 2 is my favourite all together...

[Phobus]

He is right, the shooting is the focus on basically everything that came after. More gore, more enemies, more creative weapons, but the option to just cut and run, or circle strafe with impunity (if you've got the skill) just isn't there in newer games. It is amazing to think that no development team since have had that idea.