Lamancha

"NES" Gunsmoke is the name of one of the author's previous maps. It's a subset of New Order and I didn't like either very much. Although I do like New Order the band, especially Technique.

"This DAC wad, originally released on December 2nd, is what I would call a meat and potatoes map, in other words very atypical" - shurely some mishtake?

>>>> 7. Page 12 has the worst continuty ever. First panel: The plasma rifle is right in front of him in front of some nukage (no environmentalist rant? :( also he starts coming out with colloquialisms from Newcastle in England?!??) <<<< I think he's supposed to be talking in Scottish; "I'm all about" (which should be "aboot") is a Scotism and although "reet" as a synonym for "right" is popular in Yorkshire etc it is also used in Scotland. I doubt that the writers of the Doom comic are aware that Newcastle exists. I assume it wasn't written by Marvel UK. On the same page the Doom matelot talks about "heavy ordinance", which is a typo; he should have said "ordnance": http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/ordinance.html I understand that criticising the Doom comic for spelling errors is futile.

Well, if you're less than (mumble) years old you might not even have heard of Yes. Kids - you didn't miss anything. But then again there was a remix of the song by Max Graham in the charts not long back, so perhaps the young people of today have been poisoned with the perversion that was prog rock. According to the Ministry of Sound's website, Max Graham "embarked on a feat of sound engineering to update Trevor Horn’s original - splitting it into 400 component parts and reconstructing it by adding deep baselines, contemporary percussion and synths!", which sounds like a waste of effort for what is essentially the original song, with new drums, no guitar solo, and some garnish.

The bassline that runs throughout the song from Commander Keen sounds very much like the rhythm guitar part from "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes.

Now that's a thing. Doom came out just as CD drives were becoming the standard, and for years afterwards it was the fashion for games to span multiple CDs. With lengthy cutscenes featuring poor-quality CGI backdrops, and cheap television actors intoning purely functional dialogue. Doom has none of that. It has intermission screens and that's it. There is no drama and outside the readme there is no story. There doesn't need to be. So yes, the most important minor thing that makes the game fun for me was the minor decision by the programmers to switch from making a shoot-em-up with RPG elements to making a strait shoot-em-up. That must have taken guts. As I have discovered from having to unblock a sink, it takes guts to remain unperverted by fashion, to have the correct vision and to stick to it in the midst of doubters, nay-sayers, toadies, lickspittles, cringing parasites, scum, dogs and filth. Even Quake, which I did not enjoy and which came out on CD... Quake had no truck with cutscenes. It was pure, like Audrey Hepburn. No-one ever touched her. It is heartening that Doom is still played by many people today and that I no longer have to press space to make Mark Hamill stop talking.

... up until about level five, plus bits of the third episode (just to see the sky that I had read about) at which point I got fed up with the control scheme. Although I'm sure EPSXE has a way of emulating the Playstation mouse, the game itself doesn't support mouse control. Not having the box I have no idea what's in the game beyond that, and I have no desire to play the Playstation version of Doom all the way through in 2006. What's with the "retard" comment? Christ, that's a low thing to say. You must be an awful person. You don't know me and I don't know you, and you call me a retard. Not even my friends would call me a retard, as a joke. What's it supposed to achieve? We could have got on or at least co-existed, but now I have to assume that you're a complete tit of the highest order. When you're old enough to apply for jobs you had better have a very good degree because you're going nowhere with that kind of attitude; unless you plan on not working, or getting a magic job as a level designer in the computer games industry, in which case I hope you fail at an early age. It'll teach you a valuable life lesson.

>>>> That lighting effect looks awsome, that along with the sound effects and music made it so fun. <<<< The Playstation version also has proper translucent windows, which are used to good effect at the beginning of E1M3. From what I remember the game was also missing a number of background sprite graphics - the metallic columns right at the start of E1M1 are missing, and I can't remember seeing any of the semi-transparent fence-type walls. And the sky in E3 is replaced with animated fire, which looks very impressive and probably took up less memory. I guess therefore that the programmers simply ran out of texture space in the Playstation. The archvile has a large number of frames compared to the other monsters - it runs around, it reanimates monsters, it clasps its hands together and blasts the player, and it has fire - and it doesn't appear in the game very often, so it would be an obvious candidate to be removed. Perhaps the the arachnotrons were taken out because their shots would overwhelm the Playstation's ability to draw sprites; a pair of arachnotrons firing on the player at a distance would quickly create a stream of dozens of extra sprites on top of the sprites that the game would already have to draw. The alternative would be to alter the arachnotrons so that they fire bullets in short bursts, but it wouldn't be quite the same. From what I remember the Playstation had a very limited amount of texture memory, around 2mb or thereabouts, but because most people ran it on a television the texture resolution could be lower than on a PC with a monitor. This could be an urban myth.

If you include special effects actually in Vanilla Doom, I still have a soft spot for the rising acid pool in E2M2. It came as a surprise the first time I played the game, and I assumed the whole room was going to flood. In the same level, the tiny winding path that rises from the lava sticks in my mind as being one of the very few non-switch-pulling puzzle bits from the original game. The end of E1M8, when the walls drop down and you realise that you're standing on a giant platform in the open, I remember that. I suppose this depends on how you define a special effect; I think of it as being any effect that is used very sparingly to impressive effect.

>>>> Bad Brains - Another Damn Song <<<< Excellent. Best of all, at 0:45 and 1:17 there is cowbell.

Do you have x264? If you do not know what x264 is, you probably don't have it. Therefore I instruct you to download the XviD version. If you do not have XviD, read the following sentence until you do: "The hapless homeless hobo helped Henry to find his house"

What's the music in the preview video?

Crumbs, I feel aged. I was 18 in 1994, old enough to go to B&Q and buy an actual chainsaw, if I had so desired. It must be great living in America, because you could theoretically own most of Doom's arsenal. Except for the energy weapons. "Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range." Back on topic, I don't think anybody's mentioned the <a href="http://doom.wikicities.com/wiki/Entryway">Doom Wiki</a>, which has lots of interesting Doom trivia. Not really a community, and its very small and doesn't host levels, but still. On a practical level I believe the end of Doomworld would be a huge loss; there are lots of web communities that orbit around a single point. A surgical strike against that point and the community would fragments into bits. Just as if you had blown up the sun. Some of my friends have children, perhaps they are the future. They're too young to understand Doom, though.

My thoughts on this are complex. I can remember that, back in the late 1980s, it seemed to me as if classic old Sinclair Spectrum games such as "Jet Set Willy" and "Elite" would live forever, but a decade ago I realised that my whole computing childhood was, in the wider world, a tiny niche, as alien and irrelevant to the people of America as their TI-99/4As and Nintendo Famicoms were to me. Although old 8-bit games still have a cult following on the internet, I believe that the entire British computer games scene and its legacy will mean very little to people a generation or two from now, because it is not attracting very many new fans. The reason being that most 8-bit games I mention above are mostly rubbish to play nowadays; I am are fond of them not because they are any good, but because they remind me of being young. People who were not children in the 1980s have no reason to love "Jet Set Willy". On the other hand, Doom doesn't have the same kind of nostalgic hold on me because I was an adult when the game came out. The entire 8-bit computing pantheon will be remembered in history books, but it will be as forgotten to most people as the majority of the thousands of films made before 1930. One day the film stars that thrilled my grandparents will be forgotten, too; Clara Bow, Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier, Mae West, "Casablanca" and so forth, fewer and fewer people will learn about them, until eventually no-one will impersonate Humphrey Bogart or quote from Casablanca because no-one could reasonably expect an audience to remember those things. There must have been lots of musicians and composers in the 1800s, and I bet some of them had passionate fans, but only a small minority are remembered today. History goes rolling on. The PC games scene pre-1993 is floating off to valhalla; very few of the games that existed in the 1980s for the PC are fun to play nowadays. Computer technology has rarely reached the technical plateaus that have given musicians and film-makers time to create works that are not dependant on technical advancement for their effect. But I still play Doom because it is enormously gratifying to play a game that I can whizz through in a few minutes; and Doom is still faster, more furious and more entertaining than most of its modern descendants (I thought that "Serious Sam" had the right idea, but the execution was tedious). Doom's graphics and sound are cartoonish enough that, with a modern source port, they fit the gameplay perfectly. I do not play game because I want to be 17 again; I do not want to be 17 again. I play Doom because it is great fun. And I reckon that it would even great be fun for someone who has never played Doom before. The key is to attract new blood, new fans, with a product that remains fresh. Therefore I feel that, when I play a good megawad or a decent recent level, I am capable of separating my love of a good game from my fondness for Doom. I have had more fun playing some of the megawads that I missed - I didn't really become interested in the Doom scene until a couple of years ago, so the whole "top ten wads of 2000" business is like an bunch of unopened Christmas presents - than I have had playing modern-day games. And a modern-day game costs £40, which is a lot of money when you have to pay your own rent, unsubsidised by your parents. When I play Doom I am not trying to fool myself or kid myself, and I do not feel creaky and old, as I do when I play "Horace Goes Skiing". I do not feel that I am deliberately upholding a tradition, like the marchers in Northern Ireland. I play Doom because I like it, not because I'm trying to prove a point to myself. So therefore I feel that Doom has some years left in it, because its appeal is not inextricably bound to nostalgia. It is a good, fun game, and many of the user-created levels are great fun too, and there will hopefully be more in the future and they will be fun. Doom will be ported to ever-smaller handheld and portable devices and perhaps one day when we have holodecks someone will probably recreate Doom levels. Perhaps there will be a Doom source port that allows for levels so far advanced from Doom that the top ten wads of 2010 will be almost unrecognisable as Doom levels. In which case Doom would not die, it would instead fade away, becoming less and less Doom-like as the ports become more advanced. Heck, Star Trek seemed as if it was going to be around forever, but it's moribund nowadays. Reading some of the .txt files that come with 1994 wads I get a lump in my throat at these people from 1994, convinced that "Star Trek: The Next Generation" - which was still running in 1994 - would be on television forever, and I wonder what happened to them; but if they are dead or missing it doesn't matter because we all die eventually, and there are new people to take our place. If Doom is to die it is best not to be sad, rather we should be glad that we had it. I believe the children are our future. Teach them well, and let them lead the way. And merry christmas.

>>>> Perhaps the zombies don't eat brains <<<< Although we never see the zombies eating brains, the levels are usually over in a few minutes, and given that a human brain is about the size of a pineapple, and that I could probably feed myself for a whole day with a single pineapple, it is reasonable to assume that in the time span of an average Doom session the monsters simply do not have time to become hungry. The former humans expend very little energy, shuffling about and groaning, and thus probably don't have much of an appetite, especially what with the smell, and this is assuming that their stomachs and intestines are still in one piece and able to digest food. Perhaps that is why the former humans are so unhappy to see you; they are ashamed that they have to eat brains and you do not. For example, yesterday I had prawns, and earlier today I had ham. I did not have brains at all. The Doom marine is a man like myself and shares my appetite for natural food such as eggs and bran. Or alternatively the monsters are annoyed that you have interrupted their dinner. And of course it might be that they want to eat your brain. It is a shame that society does not find my rubber sink plunger as amusing as I find it. >>>> Imps <<<< I've long wondered what motivates the monsters in Doom. They clearly have a great inner rage, and even on the pacifist walkthroughs they immediately attack the player; indeed, they are so angry that they attack each other. Some people think that a killing rage can only stem from fear, but what do the monsters have to fear? Not much, I wager. They know no fear. If an imp is wounded by a cyberdemon's rockets, the imp will attack the cyberdemon; thus I respect the imp, for he is burly. I respect the imp, but I do not desire the imp. So perhaps, instead of being driven by fear and hate, the monsters are driven by lust. There are two forces, attraction and repulsion; and the monsters generally try to seek you out. Perhaps they want to thrash you to within an inch of your life, and then have you. Or perhaps one of the Doom marine's buddies has stuck a sign on the marine's back, saying "kick me", and the monsters are just trying to point this out to the Doom marine in the only way they know how; inwardly they are saying "excuse me, mate, someone's put a sign on your back", but outwardly they shoot at you and try to bite you. Granted, the player character's sprite does not appear to have anything attached to its back, but that could be just artistic licence.