DOOM is turning 30 so let's ramble about DOOM

I feel like I’ve put this off for far too long, but hey, the series is hitting the big 3-0 pretty soon, which is a good excuse to jump into this thing and talk about why DOOM might be the only franchise out there that’s somehow still able to hold my interest across all of its iterations (yes, even Doom³).

Now part of this is pure nostalgia. I grew up playing Wolfenstein 3D on my buddy’s PC, because he was the only person I knew with a copy of the shareware. We liked killing Mecha Hitler, as one quite naturally would. There was also the one guy with the chaingun who would yell GUTEN TAG and open fire. We did a lot of cheating in those days to get by the hard parts, which to my memory were “all of them.” I think I probably haven’t run through the game again in… ever, actually. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve touched the game at all for at least like… 20 years?

Damn, maybe I should play Wolfenstein 3D again one of these days. I liked those new ones Machine Games did a lot, to be honest! Killing Nazis never gets old!

This isn’t the point, of course. The point is that unlike Wolfenstein 3D, my first encounter with a FPS ever, I don’t remember where exactly I was when I first sat down and played DOOM, although I think it was at my uncle’s house, at around 9 or 10 years old? The place isn’t particularly important – mostly because playing the game kind of turned my mind to dust upon seeing it. True, the concept of a FPS was not unknown to me (I just wasted a paragraph talking about Wolfenstein 3D, after all) but the jump in visuals – particularly the environment, to say nothing of the monster design – was something I wasn’t expecting. I mean you shoot Nazis in Wolfenstein, and sometimes dogs, and sometimes ghost Hitler or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be, but DOOM had Cacodemons, and Pinkies, and Imps, and also zombie soldiers, some of whom had shotguns. Plus instead of endless grey brick hallways broken up with endless wood hallways, you could go outside in DOOM and also the lighting effects like, existed at all and on top of that were impressive as hell. Look at them now! You’ll think to yourself “goddamn, they were doing shit with shadows and lights in 1993! That’s amazing!”

I mean these are not thoughts I had when I was a kid, the thoughts I had as a kid ran along the lines of “holy shit look at that guy’s blood going everywhere” and “does playing this game condemn me to hell” (I was able to rationalize this fear away because you know, you were killing demons, and that’s a good thing! God would surely let the whole “playing a violent video game” thing slide since it was killing demons (what it says about me that I had zero of these issues with killing Nazis is… a little weird, now that I think of it. Probably because DOOM was more overtly santanic? I’m not gonna delve too deeply in to young me’s mind here) and absolutely “oh fuck what are those big pink guys oh fuck oh fuck.”

At some point I learned the most important keystrokes a kid could learn, which were IDDQD and IDKFA and the game got less scary, but let’s be honest most of my first experience with the game was running around in a panic and dying. I don’t think I got out of E1M1 before I either had to cede the computer to someone else, got scared of my parents finding out what I was doing and telling me I was going to hell or whatever, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I kept thinking about it and I have continued to think about it to this day.

By the time Duke Nukem 3D came out I was more interested in that (did you know you can give the strippers money in that game and they will show their boobs because I knew, and back in 1996 we took our boobs where we could get them, pixelated or not. The internet wasn’t quite what it was today, you had to have a ton of patience to download a single 400x300 jpg of tits). Now look, Duke 3D has a better engine (the Build engine is fantastic, I love it) and arguably the graphics look better too (I was so impressed by the pistol in that game, the way the spent casings fly out the side and the reload animations alone were mind-blowing to a 12 year old) – and also it was the first game I ever deathmatched online with. I don’t think I did DOOM deathmatches until much later, when the game was already around ten years old and we couldn’t get Quake running on all of the computers in the high school computer lab for a bit (as soon as we solved that problem, we just played Quake deathmatch). I guess it is possible I did a little DOOM deathmatching before then, but I don’t remember it. Someone can correct me, assuming anyone reading this knew me when I was a wee lad.

Unsurprisingly high school was when I managed to get back to DOOM again, mostly because a buddy of mine had it (I do not think I owned my own copy of DOOM – like, the whole game – for years, although I definitely had a box copy of Final DOOM somehow at some point, and the fact that I do not have it any more is honestly a giant shame).

The point I am making here, in my extremely meandering way, is that DOOM – the first one in particular – is not a game I played like a million times as a kid, mostly because there were other games to play and I always died to the fucking Barons at the end of the shareware episode unless I was cheating because I didn’t play DOOM with mouselook for an extremely long time so circle-strafing was a mystery to me.

In fact, that was a giant part of why I preferred Duke Nukem 3D – you could just look around with the mouse! Way easier! At some point my buddy (the same one who showed me Wolfenstein 3D) either rented or owned a copy of DOOM 64 and I played some of that but you know what is not a fun way to play DOOM 64 is on a Nintendo 64 controller, and the music wasn’t DOOM music to me. I’ve softened on this stance considerably now, I think DOOM 64 actually kinda rules, and I might even like it more than DOOM II at this point.

You’ll notice I haven’t really mentioned DOOM II and that is because I never got into it that much beyond getting the Super Shotgun and thinking “oh my god this fucking rules” but the game turns into a slog in the middle so I never finished it. I mean, those fucking city levels are awful, there’s just no way around it, and Chaingunners are maybe the worst enemy in the series in terms of sheer frustration (I don’t mind Archviles or Revenants or even Pain Elementals (fuck Pain Elementals though)), so I never felt bad about never actually finishing DOOM II like, ever until back during the early days of the pandemic. I mean I’d watched people play DOOM II (either in person or on the internet) for years, but I never had the patience.

Quake will probably get its own essay at some point – suffice it to say that there are noises in Quake that trigger deep sense memories of sitting in the attic at 4am trying to get just one more match in with my cousins as we swapped out who was in the driver’s seat until, I think, either my uncle or my dad came upstairs and was like “you are being too loud turn this off and go to bed” and then the next night we did it again. Quake was great, it had shambling horrors and it looked fucking awesome and that main title themeripped and Quake II also came out and my older brother brought a bootleg copy of it back from Russia that I played the hell out of and was like “wait where’s the death knights? What the fuck are the Strogg? What is this bullshit? Where the fuck are the Shamblers?” but also, you know, it still ruled in its own way.

Then DOOM 3 came out and I was fucking hooked. It was terrifying to me, it had the Devil in it chortling at you as he spawned in imps to kick your ass, and it made me go back to take another look at DOOM and oh baby, that was where it really started to click with me. Finally, I understood that reloading was for chumps, and also really solidified the understanding on some level that the shotgun in DOOM 3 is a fucking criminal act and someone should be put on trial for making it so shitty. I mean come on. I cheated my way to the end of DOOM 3 and was like “fuck yeah, this is great, I hope id makes another one of these DOOM games because I bet it will rule” and then I waited for so long that I forgot, for the most part, the way that DOOM had made me feel (and anyway there was Half Life 2 to play now, where the heads did not end in points the way everyone’s head in DOOM 3 do). Resurrection of Evil came out at some point but I never really played it (still haven’t, I keep meaning to go back and correct that error but mostly when I think about doing that I just end up playing DOOM 3’s campaign again).

When DOOM 2016 came out, however, that was where I really got lost in the sauce. Playing DOOM 2016 made all the memories of playing DOOM come flooding back and suddenly I needed to play the series, all of it, as much as possible. Except for DOOM 64 because that didn’t have a proper PC release at the time and I am pretty lazy about hunting down fan-made ports. So I actually bought DOOM for the first time (I know I mentioned the box copy of Final DOOM but that was definitely a gift and not something I would’ve spent my own money on at the time) and even picked up DOOM II because why not, but mostly I was playing DOOM 2016 and having a great time.

By the time DOOM Eternal got announced I was playing various DOOM games on a pretty regular basis, getting to the point where a lot of those early levels in 1, 2, and 2016 are basically memorized. Doom 3 I don’t play as much, but I have done the intro like a million times because I cannot get enough of “THE DEVIL… IS REAL! I SHOULD KNOW…I BUILT HIS CAGE!” It also suffered from me not having a copy of it that wasn’t the BFG edition for a long time, but I recently picked the original up on Steam and, well, guess I’ll be spending some time swapping between a flashlight and a gun as god intended (yeah, yeah, it was a technological thing, but the lighting in the BFG edition sucks ass compared to the original lighting and great art is often produced under constraints). If I actually admitted how many times I have seen the Doom Slayer punch the elevator controls in 2016 I think the police might actually show up. Then of course Romero put out SIGIL and I had to check that out too, and SIGIL is…

Look, I am not joking when I say that if I had actually sat down and played through SIGIL when it came out in 2019 it might have been a contender for my favorite game that year. As it was I didn’t get around to it until late in 2020, when I went back to it and then bought a signed collector’s box because it is just that fucking good that I was like “you know who should take some of my money is John Romero” and I was right to do so because the box rules and it turns out that the Buckethead soundtrackwhips ass in a way that I wasn’t prepared for. I mean I’ve always had sweet MIDI tunes with my DOOM playing, and having like actual guitars and shit was weird, but hey, it worked for DOOM 3’s theme (an all-time banger) and the soundtracks for DOOM and DOOM Eternal are legitimately some of my favorite things to listen to, but of course they are (I will say here I am one of the probably two people who thinks the soundtracks Andrew Hulshult did for The Ancient Gods are good, actually, even if all the Mick Gordon stuff feels more iconic and all the stuff that happened between him and Bethesda bums me the fuck out). Anyway it was jarring at first but once I got used to it I was like “oh damn you know what this whips ass” and here we are.

When DOOM Eternal actually came out, we were all in lockdown and I was already playing through all the old DOOM games on my lunch breaks. This is where DOOM went from being a series I was fond of and enjoyed going back to from time to time to my go-to “I just wanna run around in a game for a bit” series of games. DOOM Eternal in particular might be a game that I go back to a ridiculous amount of times and that has a lot to do with the way its colors remind me of the original DOOM. It became, somehow, my ultimate de-stress game as well – you could probably track how stressed I’ve been at work based on how many hours of DOOM I have played lately (this is already autobiographical enough for me to comfortably say that I am dealing with some residence permit stuff at the moment and buddy, I have played through SIGIL twice this month, to say nothing of what I am currently doing in DOOM Eternal (the answer is “another run through the complete campaign on ultraviolence, because while Nightmare is a fun challenge, Ultraviolence (and its equivalent in DOOM 3 (Veteran) and DOOM 64 (Watch Me Die, I think? I’ve only run through that once)) is the platonic ideal for me vis a vis difficulty in all of these games. Challenging enough that I am barely making it out of tougher encounters but not so punishing that I spend like two hours trying to do a single Slayer Gate (I don’t remember which one it was, I think the one on Taras Nabad, but sweet jesus I was stuck on it for a long time on Nightmare – and I was fully kitted out! It just beat my ass into the dirt for that long!). I can pick it up and put it down and feel like I had a good time, and that goes for basically every game (except for some levels of DOOM II which are just a chore on any difficulty, and more or less the entirety of Thy Flesh Consumed which I do not know I will ever play again, that thing is hateful).

There’s just something about it – the speed, certainly, and not having to reload – but mostly I think it is the exhilaration of coming out of a combat encounter bloody and low on ammo but alive, something which for whatever reason other games don’t quite match, at least not for me. Again, DOOM Eternal is a big one for this – its whole “combat chess” concept makes some fights feel like puzzles – you figure out the best order in which to deal with the different demons (rule 1 for me at least is “hunt down and kill those dumb fucking carcasses as quickly as possible, those pieces of shit, I hope whoever designed the carcasses stubs their toe), you manage your resources and save your blood punches for when they’ll do the most damage, and when all else fails you pull out the BFG and hope for the best.

It’s pure power fantasy, and best of all it never gets too self-serious. DOOM isn’t really trying to say anything, what the first game is mostly saying is “we think the Devil is pretty cool, especially when you are shoving a chainsaw in its face” and while you can certainly look at the psychotic corporate-speak of DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal as being its own commentary on corporate culture, you can also ignore it (I myself adore the extremely overwrought lore in DOOM Eternal, it is the sort of shit you read in old metal album liner notes. A pity Christopher Lee wasn’t around to narrate it, that would have kicked ass). It’s just “here are some cool fucking weapons. Here are some demons. Sort it out,” and that’s it! Rip and tear until it is done!

It helps that (again, apart from some notoriously bad maps (aka probably like 30-40% of the maps in DOOM II, let’s be honest) which are just dogshit awful, to me (Romero I know you designed Perfect Hatred in like eight hours or whatever which is impressive but come on), just some real fucking slogs) the level design is fantastic – especially when it’s Romero, even more especially when it is Romero taking his time, which is what SIGIL is, which is why I am seriously debating calling in sick on the 11^th of December, because SIGIL II is supposed to release on the 10^th and I, at least, intend to play the absolute shit out of it (did I pre-order one of the fancy-ass boxes? Reader, of course I fucking did). I think the game wouldn’t stick in my mind the way it does if the levels were not extremely cool, and if they did not reward exploration with

1. More demons trying to kill you
2. Cool weapons and (in the case of 2016 and Eternal) collectable gubbins which are either stupid (little toy demons!) or useful (upgrade materials, cheat codes for when you just wanna go back and pick up the secret you missed on the first run)

I would not obsess over the level design as much as I do. It is not just running along a set path – there is always a secret to find, or some challenge thing to investigate. 2016 and Eternal might be the most linear of the lot, but even those are sprawling in a way that does not feel like every other post-Half Life game where you cannot get lost. DOOM 2016 still lets you get lost (so does Eternal in a few bits, I think I ran around the Super Gore Nest for way longer than I needed to if I’d been paying attention the first time I played through it). You feel less constrained, even the bits where you’re in corridors. DOOM 3 might be the only real exception to this, except even that lets you backtrack and hunt down cabinet codes and whatnot (I also managed to get lost in the Delta Labs and the dig site at the end, so they are still open in spite of DOOM 3 being the most linear of the games in terms of level design).

DOOM as a whole is one of the few series that I am willing to go meet on its own terms – that is to say, generally I am a proponent of “just play the game on easy if you’re having trouble, who cares” but I have become physically incapable of going below Ultraviolence, because it just feels wrong. That isn’t meant to be a boast, it is just saying that the game has altered my brain chemistry to the point where if I boot up E1M1 and there are not two shotgunners hiding behind pillars and two up top my brain recoils instinctively. Likewise if an Imp cannot absolutely wreck my entire shit with like 2-3 swipes in 2016 or Eternal I feel like I have gotten away with something illicit (although in Eternal I will 100% cop to activating the IDDQD cheat if I get through a level, realize I’ve missed one of the collectables, and have to go back in to satisfy my heinous completionist urges which only apply to DOOM Eternal and no other game).

I don’t really have anything revolutionary to say, here. I think the DOOM games are all stupid good in their own ways – yes, even DOOM 3, even if I think the Cacodemon in DOOM 3 looks like dogshit, just a fucking criminal redesign made worse by the fact that you can blow up its projectiles as it spits them and kill it with the splash damage alone, even with how much the shotgun sucks and the sound on the machine gun is one of the worst things I have heard in my life – and it seems weird to me that they’ve been around for 30 fucking years and I have played them, on and off, for more or less 30 years (more accurately for 28 years, I was only a wee lad of eight years old when it came out – but also it is not out of the question, since I absolutely played Wolfenstein 3D when I was like, 6 or 7). They’re just fucking good! If you have somehow never played them, you can even get them for extremely cheap! GoG sells the originals for like €2, and if you download gzdoom and toss the .wads in there, you get some nice graphical options and such. You can also get the Bethesda re-releases, they’re fine too, but for whatever reason something feels off about them to me? I think it’s something about the lighting; I can’t quite put my finger on it, I would have to really sit down and do some side-by-side testing and I don’t have time for that. Shit, I barely had time to sit down and write this.

Seriously though, if you haven’t played the original DOOM I think you probably should. Whack it on Ultraviolence if you’re up for it, don’t forget to hump the walls to find some secrets, and remember that you can always stunlock a cacodemon with the chainsaw if you get in quick enough to save ammunition. You don’t have to play DOOM II, although I’ve been playing it again (shocking, I know) and I think I might be more into it this time than I was last time around. Chaingunners can still get fucked though, I would rather fight Pain Elementals if I had to choose, and nobody wants to fight Pain Elementals, those fuckers spawn Lost Souls like it’s going out of style.

Anyway, happy 30^th birthday, DOOM! I will celebrate by playing SIGIL II like it is going out of style and foolishly hoping that id announces another DOOM soon (maybe on the 10^th, when the actual 30^th birthday is).

Although if I’m being honest, I kinda want them to announce a new Quake that is an actual follow-up to Quake 1. Give me more Shamblers! I want more Shamblers!

DOOM has the best shotgun in gaming history

I have to admit that I kinda missed the DOOM train. It was never a game we had in my house, since that ended up being where my mother drew the line. By the time I was able to play anything in the series we were all the way at DOOM 3. I remember liking it in a kind of "this is alright" sort of way, but without the frame of reference of the first two games, I also remember being baffled by why people made such a big deal out of the series.

As far as the more modern ones go, I really enjoyed Doom (2016) and equally did not enjoy Eternal. However, I do feel like this idea of "combat chess" is really overblown. If we're making a comparison to chess, then neither of the recent games successfully replicated it at all. Chess is all a game all about decisions, which is largely lacking in the DOOM games. In 2016, you never needto make a choice, since the Super Shotgun will cover 95% of your needs. On the other hand, Eternal's design is so rigid that there's never a choice to make, you use the counter for the particular enemy and that's it.

Ahem. The Marathon series would like a word . . .

DOOM (1993) holds up extremely well and is loads of fun today. It's a great game to play while listening to podcasts. Unfortunately Doom (2016) made me feel nauseous within a half-hour of playing the demo (due to motion sickness, that is, not due to the silly gore) so I will never learn to appreciate its virtues.

I guess I should play SIGIL lol. good read here Ford

I was a Half Life kid so i mostly ignored Doom, i recognised it for its importance but it was slightly before my time, i tried it here and there but i didn't have the nostalgia to carry me past the first couple of levels.

Doom 3 was impressive...... unfortunately it came out the same year as Half Life 2 :P so i also ignored it, among my school friends you were either in the Doom 3 or the Half Life 2 camp and would talk shit about the other, so i would make fun of having to get the torch out constantly, the crappy guns and that there was a visible corner of a polygon on the tops of people's heads.

I played Quake 4 the following year so that was my exposure to the engine and more my speed, i'm not too much into horror games, i did play through Doom 3 when they re-released it allowing you to use the torch and guns at the same time and all i remember is really disliking the 2nd half of the game, it becomes a real grind.

Doom 2016 was good but i'm one of those people who never made peace with glory kills, i used the rune to speed them up and it's kind of funny that's even in the game like they caved to feedback and slipped it in as an option, i'm not complaining, but it's the one thing that messes with the flow of the game. Weapon upgrades are a neat idea but i didn't like having to do challenges to unlock some of them, i think it's a sin in game design to force the player to play a certain way instead of how they want to play (within reason), what makes it worse is that there's no New Game+ so if you want to replay it you'll have to chase down all the upgrades again. Still, despite my gripes it's still really good and i enjoyed the whole "they're stuck in hell with you" vibe, the soundtrack was great.

Doom Eternal... i really didn't like it, they took everything i didn't like about 2016 and amplified it, more requirements during combat in order to succeed, more annoying enemy types, expanded platforming which i didn't mind but it meant spending more time stopping and jumping around for upgrades and collectables, pausing and studying the map because of the verticality. The "lore" also got a bit silly, Doom Guy was a badass monster of a dude before but now we're decorating his room with posters and electric guitars, listening to audio logs of people singing his praises like he's Superman, the flashbacks where you find out he's just an edgy teenager stuck in the body of a man, that moment was very cringe inducing, i did finish it the end boss was bad i give it a 6/10, soundtrack still good.

So yeah i can't really claim to be a Doom fan but i appreciate the early games, i love Quake 4 and Prey so i appreciate Doom 3 for that, there's loads of absolutely fantastic GZDoom games and Brutal Doom with the Extermination Day campaign is my favourite Doom game.

I got to Doom in 2021 and it gripped me like a fever. Doom 2, not so much. Super Shotguns and new enemies are nice but I felt the encounter design went a little off the rails.

One day I'll beat them both on Ultra Violence. Maybe not the Plutonia Experiment, though.

Nobody played Marathon, so we don;t know about the gun

@sombre: And somehow, DOOM 3 has the worst shotgun in gaming history. id holds both records! Truly they are trailblazers.

@therealturk: Yeah maybe "combat puzzle" is the more appropriate term to use (particularly in terms of DOOM Eternal). You have the tools and you just have to apply them in the proper way to get the best result. For me, this absolutely whips ass, it tickles my brain in a good way and I love how over-the-top the glory kills get. That said, I also usually use the perk that speeds them up, because while I personally think they are just about at the right speed to not fuck with the flow too much, something about them sped up is... extremely hilarious to me. You just flit around from one poor bastard to the next twisting heads off or stomping skulls or whatever and it is deeply, deeply funny to me.

@mwhan: SIGIL is crazy good - and SIGIL on Ultraviolence is frankly unruly. Just a constant stream of "oh you gotta be fucking kidding me" and a lot of frantically having to dance around Barons of Hell with a shotgun. It is probably the most desperate I have ever felt playing DOOM!

@shindig: I feel like I have to play through DOOM II a few more times before I think about trying Plutonia for real; it is a terrifying fucking experience and there are so many chaingunners. I don't think I've ever made it more than a few levels in before tapping out.

So, so many chaingunners.

I liked all the Doom games, including Doom 3. Yes, the separate flashlight thing in the future with the guns was kind of silly, but the graphics, the presentation and everything else was so ahead of its time. I first got my taste of Doom on the SNES, and even though I would find out that the port was not as good as the original game and some other ports, I still have fond memories of that version of the game. Doom 2016 is the closet I think we might ever get to a perfect FPS experience. That game came together so perfectly, it almost seems like a happy accident. Especially, when Doom Eternal took such a huge step back when it came out from 2016.

With all that said, I'm one of the few people who believes the original Unreal was better than the original Doom, because of the epic feel and scale of that game.

You know it's funny, I had a copy of Unreal and I remember being impressed by it but the only thing Unreal means to me is Unreal Tournament Gold - in the Quake III vs UT wars, I was on UT's side! Unreal though, I dunno, something about it never quite hit for me! It was fine, I liked it well enough, but it did not burrow into my brain like a tick.

I mean it's certainly bigger and you can do a lot more in it, but with DOOM I think there's a definite "you had to be there" because this shit simply did not exist before DOOM (yes, yes, there were multiple games released on the Wolf3D engine, yes, yes, most of them suck balls) so it was a real fucking revelation!

I trying to run doom on steam and run into issue with it. Any else has the problem. The error I get when trying to run it is application cannot load.

@raja_ji19: nvm, I figure it out. Please refer to this if anyone else run into issue https://techcult.com/fix-steam-application-load-error-30000065432/c

@sombre: I stand by my statement. Does Doom use a T2-style reload? No. No it does not. Can you dual wield shotguns that use a T2-style reload? No. No you cannot.

Marathon 2's shotgun pair is great and would probably be in a very close race for "best video shotgun" if it weren't for three things.

First, as fun as they are to use, they never felt as effective to me as the Super Shotgun in Doom 2. Durandal has the animations and the sound on par or better than Doom 2, sure, but they don't seem to cause as much damage as the one in Doom 2.

Secondly, they also chew threw ammo absurdly fast. I've always enjoyed using them, but I also always remember feeling like I was out of ammo before I was done using them. That's probably the biggest killjoy, actually. I have run out of shotgun ammo in Doom 2 but it seems like you're never far from more.

Thirdly... have you played Trepang2?

Bonus point - the first FEAR has a shotgun with 12 rounds in it, reloads nearly instantly, ammo is plentiful, it does real good damage, and it's useful from the time you pick one up until the game forcefully takes it away from you at the end. I'd personally also place it above Marathon Durandal's shotguns.

None of this is to say that Durandal's shotguns don't deserve more respect. They absolutely do. I just think they fall just a tiny bit short of the tiny handful of games with a Doom 2-tier shotgun.

I have a similar story than you, and I suspect many kids of that age, in that I first saw Doom at my uncle's house, though I must have been around 5-6 years old at that point. I would like to tell you that it was love at first sight, but so much of that experience just didn't make sense to me. I had some experience of video games on the Commodore 64 and the NES, and Doom was just so far ahead that I didn't even get it. My uncle put on cheat codes for me, which was the right move as I probably wouldn't have made it past the first encounter otherwise, but the side effect of that was that for a long time I thought that in Doom you couldn't die, and I also figured that was the case for all PC games. We eventually got a PC, and I've been a PC gamer ever since, but by that point there were newer games on the market that it didn't really make sense to play Doom or Doom 2 even though before the Internet those were probably by far the most traded diskettes at school. A few times in my later years I have made honest attempts to actually play the early Dooms but they didn't really hook me.

Years later, there was a leaked Alpha build of Doom 3 which I downloaded as a full-on elite hackerman that I had grown into, and I was really impressed that my mediocre PC could run it at all. That build didn't have enemy AI so you had zombies just standing there, not doing anything, and there was something just terrifying about that. Any horror movie where you've seen a mannequin scene, it was like that. The zombie probably can't come alive, but what if it does... I eventually played some of the final game, again being damn impressed at the graphics and just happy that it ran on my computer, but the PC gaming culture where I lived anyway was that we didn't like Doom 3 because they turned it into a dark (literally dark) horror game, presumably because they couldn't render many graphically demanding enemies at the same time so you'd almost always fight one or maybe two enemies at a time, a design that crept into a lot of other games around that time.

Regarding Doom 2016, this may be a weird complaint but I felt that the missions went on too long. Most sensible players would probably stop playing when they get bored, but I like natural end points and when I started a chapter I pushed myself to finish it in that sitting if nothing important came up, and those missions just went about 20 minutes too long every time as the game didn't have much variety. Also the upgrade structure didn't make much sense and you'd probably search for upgrades after killing enemies who don't respawn, and I'm not saying that I want them to respawn but it felt weird to spend so many minutes trying to get to an upgrade without seeing a single enemy. I still like the game overall but Wolfenstein 2014 to me is the superior game, which seems to be against the popular opinion. Eternal I haven't played, and probably won't.

Doom '16 is a near perfect game where even the history managed to feel great. To bad Eternal killed it.

I'm somehow always still a little bit shocked by the dislike for Doom Eternal. I bought that game, played it, had a fucking blast, thought it was the best combat loop in any FPS ever (and I still think that), and then I got online and it seemed like roughly half the people who played it were incredibly disappointed.

And I get why... but, for me, that combat was incredibly satisfying. It was also incredibly demanding. It's worth noting that I don't find "crush everything with little challenge or difficulty" to be a power fantasy. If you're never on the edge of death in a game like Doom Eternal, it's kind of just boring. Somehow Doom Eternal found a way to make it feel like you're always on the edge of death and you're still making it through, and that's so much more satisfying. I don't feel a power fantasy unless whatever I'm fighting is also powerful.

One of the primary complaints was "you have to use certain weapons on certain enemies", which isn't true in the base game. You basically have infinite ammo, just chainsaw whatever meatbag is closest to you, and use whatever gun you like - anything's viable, though some guns will be more difficult than others (aside: you might not be able to stick to one single gun for the entire game but... you're not doing that are you? Certainly you're switching things up at some point!?). Except when it comes to the Marauder, which ruins all three or four scenes he's in over the course of a ten to fifteen hour game, and in the DLC, which actually forces you to use certain guns with certain attachments on certain enemies in a way that genuinely was frustrating. The Cursed Prowlers are an especially shitty enemy.

@justin258: My issue with the combat in Eternal was having to balance doing what you want to do in combat with generating healing, armour and ammo, it was designed to be a juggling act or rather... it was already a juggling act in Doom 2016 but with only 2 balls, now you're juggling with 4/5 balls and i guess the word i'd use for how that feels is "busy" or "distracting", the combat gets frequently interrupted because you have to go feed your Doom Guy.

Also Brutal Doom has the best shotgun.

Yeah I had a similar surprise when it came to the response, because like you I think the combat is perfection, and I am a sicko who loves juggling multiple different things (should I chainsaw? should I grenade? I need armor, better flame belch, okay now grenade and get a bunch of armor). In fact I am an even bigger sicko who kinda loves the DLC forcing you to use attachments, because I basically never used the multi-shot functionality of the shotgun and really tended to avoid the tether for the plasma rifle too, and having to use them kind of got me into doing things differently, if that makes sense? I really like Ancient Gods, that's what I am saying, ultimately.

I don't hate Eternal. It's a much better Doom 2 but I'll take the simplicity of the first game over it.

Original Doom and more specifically after playing Doom II (The super shotgun, the new enemies) was a life altering experience for me. Sure, Doom II was an expansion pack (damn, the venacular in the age of Doom-clones) but the difference to gameplay with that double-shotty and Pain Elementals and Arch-Viles was just the thing that made that gameplay loop perfect.

Originally my family had the Mega-Drive but since before Doom came, and being lucky, my dad was always against consoles and wanted us kids to learns those goddamn computers. I still appreciate that weird time grow up at, and having some understanding of the time before and after the internet came to be, but still the Doom lurked.

Many years after I loved researching (when the internet wasn't the thing) the original versions those faux-metal tracks by Bobby Prince he made when Romero threw the discs to make the music, and I still love those albums from Pantera to Black Sabbath and Alice In Chains.

Some years after I connected with some friends who I didn't know to appreciate at the time, just to have some good old time to LAN deathmatch Doom (When at the time it was all Counter Strike, Action Quake and.... the original Ghost Recon of all the things)

When the approachable tools came (Doom Builder) I became once again immersed in the whole gameplay once again. I always loved a game with a level editor in any game, but never once focused enough with anything. (Unlimited Adventures... eugh). But with some friends we made some .wads and that was really fun to do since you knew the games from inside out. I think I have some 20 maps I may now have to return to. And that's where I'll always return to Doom II, just that one weapon and few more enemy types was just enough to perfect the now named "Combat Puzzle". On Ultra-Violence the most dangerous enemies were the shotgunners and machinegun-wally's, and the Fuck You of hiding an Arch-Vile in an obscure corner, in level where you had to tread the same few hallways but triggering new stuff when you returned with a new set of skull-keys.

I apprecciate what Doom 3 was at the time and I loved Doom (2016) but maybe that was the beatiful elegy for me, Eternal didn't do it for me. I'm fine whatever is to come, maybe it'll be good again some time in the future.

I overall enjoyed Doom Eternal enough to finish it. BUT... a lot of the combat felt like busy work instead of fun gameplay. The pacing was also off compared to 2016, which felt like a well oiled machine with how smooth the combat and levels are.

The multi-year Doom thread by @vaiz is one of my favorite dumb memories on this site.

Anyway, Doom rules. I enjoyed every game and think Doom: Eternal is one of the best FPS games ever made, especially with the climactic DLC.

If I play an old one, it'll be the first episode of the original. I still remember reading about it in EGM, but I didn't have a gaming PC so it lived on in my imagination until my friend brought over Final Doom on the Playstation. Later in college, I had a decent laptop and if I arrived early in class I'd just load up Doom and have a great start to the hour. These days, I have the game on the Xbox so I'll occasionally play a few levels on there.

Doom 2016 was an awesome return, but Eternal really zeroed in on what I liked and blew up the scope. I really enjoyed the gameplay loop and it's basically a perfect game on a technical level. Some of the most intense battles I've ever had in an FPS, with the tightest controls of any modern shooter. It established id as one of the best developers in the industry in my mind, again, even if it's all new people now. After playing the Quake II remaster, it just makes me hope for a big budget Quake reboot using the principles they learned.

Original Doom is one of the most important games ever made, and it's a series with a hell of a track record.

@csl316: Yeah I think the controls and engine in Eternal are something that I sometimes forget about because I am too busy killing demons and having a blast, but I took a step back the last time I booted it up (having all the bells and whistles, even ray tracing which is just a silly thing to have in the game) and it really knocked my socks off all over again. Just a visual feast and a real technical achievement that floors me every time (and it even runs decently on the fucking Steam Deck, of all things, which I honestly didn't think it could do - the Switch port is a small miracle but it also looks like ass and frankly probably shouldn't have happened, but I can't help but be impressed anyway).

Its the one game where if the feel arrives, I start up E1M1 and go left, up the stairs and stare out the windows at the scenary, then turn it off.