ETTiNGRiNDER

I would hazard to speculate, from stuff like interviews, the Masters of Doom book, the Doom Bible, and such, that the whole action/horror split in perspective might've gone all the way back to the devs at id themselves... Tom Hall and Sandy Petersen (and maybe Adrian Carmack?) seemed more to be on the "horror game with action" side of things and John Romero and John Carmack more on the "action game with horror" side. That's just my guess though. I feel like Doom 3 while I wouldn't go as far as to say "what it was meant to be" was closer to the vision Hall had originally set out in the Doom Bible... you at the very least see some elements revived from there that didn't make it into the original. But I also feel like a lot of Doom 3 was just plain imitative of Half-Life after that'd become the new yardstick of what a "good FPS" was considered to be, when before, Doom and Quake were that yardstick themselves. I think that gaming in general has also just plain become a lot more jaded... Maybe it's partly an in-general thing, a been-there-done-that; I remember when I played through Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight my distinct thought was "if this came out in the 90s, it probably would've been hailed as some sort of cult classic but now it just comes off as 'fairly decent indie game' and not much more". I was also looking at some shareware CDs not too long ago and having a laugh about how Doom was touted as "THE ULTIMATE VIRTUAL REALITY GAME" on the cover of one of them. They sure loved the term "virtual reality" at that point in time and it seems pretty quaint now but I guess at the time, Doom really was pretty amazingly advanced. And also maybe it's partly that we're all just getting older. I had a similar "HOW STRONG ARE YOU!? WHY DON'T YOU DIE!?" moment to the OP's though with the cacodemon rather than the pink demon when I first played registered Doom. I also remember being scared to the point of nightmares by some of the stuff in Monster Bash when I was a kid. Both of those things are a bit of a laugh in retrospect, but I wasn't laughing back then (and what the hell, Apogee. Some of their stuff probably really wasn't appropriate for kids back in those days before ratings and stuff and people not knowing better, despite presenting as cute cartoony games.)

Do you mean the combo icon on the status bar if you have both the card and skull of the same color in ports that added a difference between them? Or just having a mixture of some keys being cards and some being skulls in general?

Zaero is a ZDoom set that uses resources from the unofficial Q2 expansion by the same name. The Darkening: Episode 2 uses its own set of textures but also has a Quake 2 influence on its visuals.

Odamex is still Doom(2)-only, right? I know one of the reasons I leaned more to Zandy was the Heretic and Hexen support.

On the topic of bizarre things to make a kids' cartoon out of, I remember there being a weird Conan the Barbarian one too, but I only watched one episode before deciding to pass on it.

Recordings with vanilla resulting in a desync with everything kind of makes me wonder if some sort of memory corruption is involved, in which case yeah it could be your DeHackEd patch to blame.

Doom 2 MAP05 has some ammo hidden behind the exit chamber if you can get yourself into the cacodemon alcoves to the sides of it. If I'd ever found that before I'd forgotten about it.

There have been attempts at it in Heretic and Hexen. Sometimes the Heretic ones work out, the Hexen ones not so much. I'm not well versed enough on what's out there for BUILD to say for sure, but I'd be surprised if someone hasn't tried to make something of the sort for Duke.

As always, http://ettingrinder.youfailit.net Not much to look at, I know, but its brutalism is somewhat of a deliberate protest against modern bloated web design.

Heh, when I was a kid I had this whole Egyptian tomb game that I made up that I drew on sheets of paper as a board & card game because I didn't have the programming knowhow to make a video game out of it. There were all these numbered rooms laid out with some passages between them, and you could either go to adjacent rooms or sometimes you'd draw a "find a secret passage" card which was basically a teleport to some other room in the pyramid. You were supposed to collect all the treasures or as many as you could I guess, I don't remember exactly. Some rooms would have a hazard like bats, snakes, traps, etc. where you'd draw a card from the appropriate deck and you might be forced to escape to an adjacent room, survive, survive and find a treasure, escape through a secret passage, or one of the large number of result cards that just said "YOU DIE" which might explain why none of the two or three people I managed to get to try it liked it very much. I think I maybe tried to convert/remake it as a ZZT mod at one point but didn't get very far with that. I don't think I still have it, but who knows, maybe it's packed up somewhere in one of the boxes that went elsewhere in the family for safekeeping. I did find some other video game concept drawings / notes from back then recently, albeit nothing super exciting (mostly some Super Mario Bros. knockoff stuff).

Either is acceptable, depending on the WAD and what you're going for with it, just make sure if you do go the requiring textures separately route that you make it abundantly clear for people who might just run the level on its own and not understand why things are messed up. Personally I like to have textures in the same WAD as levels.

If you define things that strictly, then there isn't and never will be a port that matches what you're looking for, since A) the source code as released was for the Linux version of Doom, not the DOS one and B) code for some parts of the DOS EXE (the sound system at the very least) were left out due to licensing problems.

A bit of a tangent but when I first played Rise of the Triad a long time ago and called up the music jukebox, the track title "Run Like Smeg" had me wondering who Smeg was and how fast did Smeg run anyway.

@Gez I've rarely seen that done in a way that was particularly good. The best instance I can recall is in some of the Legacy of Kain games where they basically had a few different mixes of a composition and could seamlessly transition from the "calm" version to the "intense" one or whatever based on what was going on. Not sure if there's anything in Doom ports advanced enough to do that sort of timing matching.

Uhhh, if you mean Duke It Out In DC, Nuclear Winter and Life's A Beach they came on CDs you know. You could look for those.