This guy hates Doom for sure

[Merry Widow]

@Rush: Been a member since 2012.This isn't about me anyway.It's about an article some started a topic on.

[geo]

After reading through the other comments in this thread about the drama, I took a stab at reading the 4,000+ word "essay." Its a sea of experiences and "there were games I liked more" rather than a review of Doom. I enjoy the parts where he goes into explaining people were too poor or ignorant to know there are better games. There are some classic lines in this "essay" to insult any fan of Doom. There was an entire paragraph on why the writer is superior to Doom's fan base. At some point the writer elaborates that a medical professional would find a Doomer on the autistic spectrum.

 

To make the "essay" more enjoyable for myself to read, I made a game out of it where I'd cut out the writer's EXCESSIVE personal history to make it more of a review. Here is 1,000 words of review rather than 4,000+ of essay.

 

====================================================================

 

Doom and Full Throttle were simple, short games that could be easily saved and continued whenever, so I was planning to play both from start to finish with my friend. In the end, we'd didn't finish either, though I did eventually finish Full Throttle on my own, if memory serves right. I'll try now to explain why I didn't finish Doom.

 

Doom made a very good first impression on us. It looked good — certainly up to the standards of the time for games using sprite-scaling technology —; the atmosphere was top notch — a brooding environment filled with genuinely frightful enemies and relentless combat overseen by a serious, heavy soundtrack that demanded our attention; and the newly expanded and refined mechanics finally delivered on the smooth first-person action promise that Wolfenstein's stilted, awkward mechanics had botched so badly the year prior. So we spent some hours passing the controls back and forth between us, one life at a time, and seeing how far we could each get before the hordes overwhelmed us and we had to relinquish control to the other. But as we progressed further and further into the game, the same thing happened that would happen to me when I was playing dungeon crawlers on my own: we got lost in the middle of some dungeon somewhere, spent a life or two trying to find the way forward, failed, and just gave up.

 

The action wasn't all that great either, after the novelty of the basic mechanics had worn off. The moveset may have been considerably expanded from Wolfenstein's, and a wider, more imaginative and far better realized choice of weapons and items may have been added, as well as a very welcome but still rudimentary quasi-platforming dimension; but there were still no setpieces or vehicles or even proper levels or boss fights, and after a while the whole thing just got old. The problem with the dungeons was merely the last straw; we had already lost interest half an hour earlier, and kept going solely due to inertia; and when we realized, on top of that, that we'd been going in circles for the last couple of lives, we just gave up and moved on to Full Throttle. Don't imagine, by the way, that we were overly critical of the game, or even critical at all.

 

It's worth noting, by the way, that just as when moving from one dish to the next the latter always possesses precisely those qualities which were missing from the first — and this is why no sane chef would ever place two soups in a meal one after the other — so too Doom's lack of variety in terms of colors and levels and story and so on were precisely what Full Throttle offered in abundance.

 

Doom wasn't good enough even for that type of playstyle, since when I tried it again on my own the next day, after my friend had left, I couldn't bring myself to play it any more at all. It was the same story, once again, as with the dungeon crawlers: I just couldn't continue them once I had broken up a session and tried to pick them up again. I would always find myself in the middle of a dungeon, every direction of which looked identical to every other, having forgotten entirely which way I had come from and where I was supposed to be going, and I couldn't be arsed spending 15 minutes going round in circles until I'd figured it all out. With Doom it would have been more like five minutes, but the idea still oppressed me.

 

And that's the thing with Doom that I wouldn't have been able to to grasp if I had cared enough back then — which of course I didn't, since I only tried it for a minute or two before giving up and doing something else instead: the damn game didn't have levels any more than Wolfenstein had! Still every screenshot of the damn thing looking exactly the same as any other! Did id people play any games at all besides their own? They didn't even seem to know what a level is because it would give you a new level's name on the screen while still being the same fucking level! People today have even been brainwashed (via inveterate pseudo-criticism and relentless googling) to think Doom was a masterpiece of level design and Romero a master level designer. Well, if going nuts and autistically copy-pasting identikit corridors all over the place in a level editor all day long counts as "level design", maybe. But it doesn't. That's level design: distinct levels, but connected by narrative logic. Stupid stuff like Doom it was inexcusable and even worse than in the worst dungeon crawlers, and that's why it was impossible for me to persevere with this game; and if it was so in 1994 it is a million times more so today, when there exist hundreds upon hundreds of FPSes that are superior to Doom in every way, many of which I haven't played at all. Name any mediocre modern FPS — the Medal of Honor reboot, for example — and I am 100% certain I'd have more fun with that than with Doom today.

 

That was Doom then: aesthetically far superior to Wolfenstein, since it no longer looked like smurf vomit, and significantly improved mechanically; but still with no levels or setpieces or a higher artistic vision beyond "here's some dungeons; shoot some creatures", which even 2D games of the '90s had long managed to move beyond. Doom then was the single-level demo to Wolfenstein's tech demo/prototype, and it was good for what it was; certainly good enough for me to have recommended it to people, if I'd been reviewing games back then, and given it a 4/5, at least for its first few hours, according to Insomnia's rating scheme. But the crucial questions remained. Would id ever learn what a level is? Would they ever hire any real visual artists? Or would their games remain forever condemned to design paradigms that died — and rightfully died — with the '70s? id's adventures in the land of game development would continue with Quake three years later.

Edited April 19, 2017 by geo

[40oz]

internet trolls aside, are there any other legitimate reviews of Doom that put it in a bad light?

 

Doom, in respect to everything it does to be fun vs. everything it does to be boring or frustrating, is a very good game. I'm a little disappointed that this guy has an obvious troll background, because if you can detach from your biased opinions and personal history with the game to show enough empathy to his personal experience, I found some of his contentions about Dooms poor level design to be well, quite fair. Doom certainly does involve a lot of mazes and misdirected navigation. Some of the puzzles are too confusing and unclear. If you capture the audio of peoples lets plays and twitch streams you'll often hear a lot more groaning and moaning and angry "what the fuck" moments than oh-fuck-yeah's or being in awe of the surroundings or other audible indications of joy. So maybe there is something of an obsession with the game more so than it simply being as objectively fun as we paint the game to be?

[BigDickBzzrak]

Just now, 40oz said:

are there any other legitimate reviews of Doom that put it in a bad light?

If only you could talk to the monsters...

(I haven't read the actual review though)

[Gez]

I had a magazine with a critical review of Doom II. Basically, the gist was that if you didn't already have the full version of Doom, then Doom II was a no-brainer, go get it, it's an excellent game. However, if you already had Doom, then, the review argued, Doom II only brought a few annoying monsters, a boring new weapon (another shotgun, yawn), some bad elevator music, and some completely gratuitous controversy-bait (Nazi-themed levels from Wolfenstein, hanging children you have to kill).

[Varis Alpha]

ahaha, the "bad music" argument existed all the way back then, too. :D

[fraggle]

On 4/17/2017 at 4:03 PM, RUSH said:

What's wrong with hyper-masculinity or a hyper-masculine game anyway?

Nobody even said there was anything wrong with it.

[DoomKnight1984]

On 4/19/2017 at 9:26 PM, bzzrak said:

If only you could talk to the monsters...

(I haven't read the actual review though)

Game reviews on Edge are just mediocre like that one - they gave Doom 7/10 just because you can't talk to demons.

 

WTF are they smoking back then?

[Arctangent]

2 hours ago, DoomKnight1984 said:

WTF are they smoking back then?

The lack of localization for MegaTen games, prob.

[Merry Widow]

@DoomKnight1984: Perhaps they were smoking catnip instead of weed?

[Aquanet]

On 4/16/2017 at 7:49 PM, Cynical said:

stabbing a police K-9

Stabbed a dog?

 

I can't find it now but a while back someone linked to a piece that discussed Doom and Ultima Underworld and said the industry fucked up by following the former (because no way could it go in multiple directions). I feel like a lot of Doom-is-overrated-and-maybe-even-sucks pieces use a rhetorical strategy of evaluating it as "a game" and not as an action or FPS game. The writers say Day of the Tentacle was so much more witty, and Ultima Underworld was more immersive. But these games had different goals.

[geo]

3 hours ago, Aquanet said:

Stabbed a dog?

 

I can't find it now but a while back someone linked to a piece that discussed Doom and Ultima Underworld and said the industry fucked up by following the former (because no way could it go in multiple directions). I feel like a lot of Doom-is-overrated-and-maybe-even-sucks pieces use a rhetorical strategy of evaluating it as "a game" and not as an action or FPS game. The writers say Day of the Tentacle was so much more witty, and Ultima Underworld was more immersive. But these games had different goals.

If your game lacks fun gameplay you need to entertain them in other ways such as wit. Relaxation over intensity.

[Tetzlaff]

I understand that he has bad spatial perception and thus hates labyrinthine non-linear leveldesign.

[Guest Unregistered account]

It's (mostly) not even very Labyrinthine, though. Which I guess is the point of the review.

 

If there's one thing I'll admit I'm a little confused about, it's that the reviewer seemed to mention something about displaying the next level's name during the current level? What?

i donut understand 

[geo]

I think he wanted more straight forward shooting gallery where you can't get lost, a story to entertain him, set pieces and different themes to make each level feel different and unique. He wanted what games would eventually become.

 

Then he went on to say he had the money to play better games unlike the peasants that like Doom. I'm paraphrasing, he made it sound much worse than I can summarize in a single sentence.

[Woolie Wool]

What icycalm wants is to make you get angry and talk about him by taking an insincere contrarian position and backing it up with insults to Doom fans and ableist language. He wrote this specifically to be an asshole.

[geo]

On 4/19/2017 at 8:26 AM, bzzrak said:

If only you could talk to the monsters...

(I haven't read the actual review though)

Grrrawwrrrr. Green man shoot us the game! Game sucks. He overpowered. I fight comrades. They easy. No experience grind mechanic 2 git bettr 2 fight green man. No chance. Gamo garbo. Worse than crack. Given 2 school kids as free demo. Git hooked. 2 violent 4 imp son. Why I no get keys when door need key? Broke game. Wait in dark room. No move until hear sound. 10 minutes locked in place. Hate Doom.  mrrrrrawwwws. -500 out of 10. Maniac Mansion better. Have story

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

On 4/19/2017 at 9:45 AM, Gez said:

I had a magazine with a critical review of Doom II. Basically, the gist was that if you didn't already have the full version of Doom, then Doom II was a no-brainer, go get it, it's an excellent game. However, if you already had Doom, then, the review argued, Doom II only brought a few annoying monsters, a boring new weapon (another shotgun, yawn), some bad elevator music, and some completely gratuitous controversy-bait (Nazi-themed levels from Wolfenstein, hanging children you have to kill).

I wish I could re-find the review of Heretic that I saw once that largely said it was a good game, but specifically complained that "some of the graphics are morbidly and Satanically evil".

[Programme]

On 4/16/2017 at 2:24 PM, dew said:

Oh yeah, I've seen that one. Guy seems butthurt that he has no power over killing a popular thing he doesn't get. Still not half as unhinged and badass as this old beauty:

https://everything2.com/user/Ashley+Pomeroy/writeups/Doom

 

[geo]

Man this forum loves Jono.