The Doom Confessional Booth

I get tired of E1M1 remakes being churned out every time a new shooter with modding capability (or really just first person games in general) is released, because people want to do 1:1 recreations instead of expanding on the source material.

I confess that my passion for Doom has been wearing off in the past few months, and it pains me to say that.

Piper Maru said:

I confess that my passion for Doom has been wearing off in the past few months, and it pains me to say that.

Eh, it happens.

I absolve you of your sins, Piper. Your passion shall return.

When I was in high school I really loved the novels that everyone seems to hate. I even memorized all the text on the back of them because I would just stare at them during class. I still remember his marine serial number whether I want to or not: 888-23-9912.

Come to think of it I also drew more than 100 Doom maps on graph paper during classes where I could get away with it. I developed symbols to represent various switch functions and whatnot. But I didn't have a computer back then and never ended up making any of them.

Ever since I first played doom, I always thought there was more in the dark room in E1M8. I always thought there was a switch on the left corner of the room (where the player teleports, it will be on your left side), which you could only see via blinking light. as well as 5 tech-pillars two on each of the players side, and one by the switch.
I have no fucking idea how I saw that.

Hiram Abif said:

I absolutely can't stand slaughtermaps. My favorite aspect about Doom is the atmosphere, not necessarily the shooty-shooty-bang-bang.

You, Are, Not, Alone.

Richo Rosai said:

When I was in high school I really loved the novels that everyone seems to hate. I even memorized all the text on the back of them because I would just stare at them during class. I still remember his marine serial number whether I want to or not: 888-23-9912.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first Doom novel too. As a 14 year old it brought to life much of what was going on in my head when I first played the game anyway.

Didn't really care for the sequel when it went more "human drama" and tried to be more grand and lofty, and never bothered with the last two.

Bauul said:

I thoroughly enjoyed the first Doom novel too. As a 14 year old it brought to life much of what was going on in my head when I first played the game anyway.

Yeah, I seem to remember you could tell what level and sometimes even what room he was talking about most of the way through the book.

Richo Rosai said:

Yeah, I seem to remember you could tell what level and sometimes even what room he was talking about most of the way through the book.

Yep. A whole bunch of the original levels were in there. Even more precisely, at one point they meet a character hanging from the ceiling (I believe they're in E3M1, or E3M9) and if you go to the room in the game there is indeed a body hanging from the ceiling. It was pretty accurate.

I enjoyed the Doom novels because the author was able to convey the "voice" of the protagonist with irony, ways of saying and so on.

While I don't remember very much of the other protagonists (the other marine? the hacker girl? the mormon?) I still remember the voice of the protagonist.

And there were some nice ideas, sci-fi speakig, like humans the only race without soul or the enemy becoming the goods at some point (or something like that)

I've decided to abandon describing anything as "easy" (and related terms) in DWMC playthroughs and elsewhere. One reason is it often comes off as humble-bragging when people do it. Imagine someone describing Valiant map31 as an easy map in response to this post -- no matter how true it might be, an apt response to that hypothetical response is http://i.imgur.com/WIRscGL.png. If you do this type of thing, stop! Another is that in most maps, survival-maximization play is underwhelming. The question of "How do I survive?" isn't so interesting at all ("do basically anything") and other potential questions such as "How do I do every fight in the fastest way possible?" or "What's the most aggressive way I can handle this part of the map while surviving reliably?" or even "How do I take zero damage?" are going to be a lot more nuanced and interesting. So not seeing past a map being easy to survive just feels like robbing yourself of potential fun.

i hope this isnt a response to my tht 05 post ⎝□﹏□⎠

^^ I immediately remembered 50shades MAP09, hah.

*blush*

rehelekretep said:

i hope this isnt a response to my tht 05 post ⎝□﹏□⎠

It's something I've been meaning to post for weeks now :)

I miss the era of personal websites. Nowadays if you tell people to visit your site to learn more and get updates on your stuff, you get shit. I think it's worrying how people are getting more and more used to the idea that everything has to be in one centralized place. I like visiting other people's sites, which feels like visiting someone's home and getting to experience a bit of their personality. It seems a more human way to do things. Maybe I'll open a site and just post my shit there instead of Doomworld. Gotta fight modern trends.

Doom 2016 related, but I didn't know you had to equip runes until near the end of the game. And I was playing on nightmare, so when I realized my mistake the game instantly became much easier.

Maybe instead of describing something as hard or easy pertaining to your own skill caliber, you could describe it relative to a particular constant. So for the sake of argument, we could call Doom 2 on ultra violence "normal" and anything that gives you more trouble than doom 2 is harder and anything that gives you less is easier.

Except today it might make more sense to use something like Plutonia or Hell Revealed 1 as your constant otherwise almost everything would be "hard" and no one would know what your talking about.

Memfis said:

Gotta fight modern trends.

fight the good fight, comrade!

I thought about putting doom stuff on my personal site after I was inspired by the sexiness of doom staze, I still might get around to that one of these days. even if 0 people end up going to it it could be useful as a personal catalog. Another benefit is that you can offer direct download links. It seems like a lot of free hosting services are becoming increasingly obtrusive (mediafire with its horrific popups, for example), dropbox links with dl=1 are a nice free option at the moment though...

re: difficulty stuff: I think it's fine to complain about personally finding something to be too easy or too hard. such comments are already contextualized by the player providing it, and voicing contrary opinions can be useful just to see what all is floating around in the ether (i.e. feeling compelled to post that something felt offputtingly hard when no one else seems to be commenting on it, or the opposite). I don't think roaming billy-badass' with snarky #doom-skill-shaming posts are common enough to be problematic. re: intentional handicapping: players have different levels of willingness to coerce themselves into enjoying something that when played "the way they want" and not "the way the mapper wanted" is a not-so-great experience. personally I find it rather difficult to commit to unraveling a fun way to play something that failed to make a decent first impression, but that might just be because I play much less these days.

Re: People talking about personal sites - Unless your site has 0 content, I wouldn't worry about getting no hits. Doomkid's Wad Shack got hundreds of hits per month even when it was on geocities, now that I've changed it to Doomshack.org and started hosting online Doom servers the hits are well over a thousand per month. If you've got something to share, people won't ignore it, but you do have to tell people it exists if you want to see your hit counter go up.

Memfis said:

Gotta deal with modern trends.

Fixed it for you.

Seriously though, I kinda miss it too. I also miss the days when there was no Spotify or Tidal, or no HBO or Netflix etc., when you HAD to go buy/rent/borrow stuff to watch/listen/play. When you could excuse a trip to your buddy at the other side of the city just to listen to the new record he had aquired or borrow that awesome movie. But hey, those days are gone.

Who am I kidding. I'm not the one to speak, seriously. My band is recording our stuff on old tape recorders from the 70's and releasing shit on cassette tapes and choose not to put anything of it on the internet, just because of what I said up here. It's just that when it comes to computer stuff like games (or rather Doom, since I don't play anything else) I don't want to spend my time checking lot's of obscure sites. Maybe that's hypocritical, but I dont care ^_^

I always thought, and tbh I still do it, that the CEMENT textures are somekind of rotting wood planks instead of being concrete-like material.

I never beat Doom 1 or 2 on nightmare mode, let alone ultra violence (UNLESS IF WITH PROJECT BRUTALITY COUNTS)

Sgt Ender said:

I never beat Doom 1 or 2 on nightmare mode, let alone ultra violence (UNLESS IF WITH PROJECT BRUTALITY COUNTS)

I don't think normal people are supposed to be able to seriously beat the whole games on Nightmare mode. I for one consider UV to be annoyingly too easy as a modern player but the few times I've actually given Nightmare a serious shot it always ended after 5 minutes of bemusement.

In Doom 4, incidentally, Nightmare is a very reasonable and rewarding difficulty.

gaspe said:

I always thought, and tbh I still do it, that the CEMENT textures are somekind of rotting wood planks instead of being concrete-like material.

I tend to interpret them as nothing more specific than slightly dirty wallpapers with some patterns painted on them.

scifista42 said:

I tend to interpret them as nothing more specific than slightly dirty wallpapers with some patterns painted on them.

I didn't really think of them as anything honestly. Lmao

Richo Rosai said:

I don't think normal people are supposed to be able to seriously beat the whole games on Nightmare mode. I for one consider UV to be annoyingly too easy as a modern player but the few times I've actually given Nightmare a serious shot it always ended after 5 minutes of bemusement.

What about UV -fast? That's how I play Doom 1, as a rule.

UV -fast changes the gameplay too much in an unbalanced direction that I don't enjoy.

If you mean "unbalanced" as "requiring faster reflexes / movements than you have / can do / feel comfortable doing" (because I don't see how else does UV -fast change "balance"), I agree, it's the same for me, I just wouldn't call it "unbalanced", but simply "too hard for me". :)

damerell said:

What about UV -fast? That's how I play Doom 1, as a rule.

Doesn't that make the monsters just stand there and shoot like arachnotrons whenever you're visible though? I seem to recall it being kinda silly. I prefer to use a dehacked file that cuts health and ammo to about 1/4th the original amounts. Then I'm forced to play conservatively, use the berserk and chainsaw, and getting hit is a big deal.