Retro Game of the Week, Week 4

For me PC gaming was a bit of a joke before Doom. I was wrong in thinking that but most friends with PCs at the time only had a 286. So when I call over we would play some really ropey looking EGA games or scorched earth which didn't impress next to 16 bit console graphics. They also had a little game called Wolfensteins 3D which was great fun but wasn't mind blowing. It was either that or trying to get past the questions at the start of leisure suit Larry so we could type in dirty words.

Then in the gaming magazines at the time I read about a hyper violent game called Doom on PC. It looked extraordinary. Not only that but the heavy metal album cover style visuals just spoke to my awkward teenage self. Couple that with the hyper violence and it was a game I just had to have... But I had no PC.

A few months later I met a friend who is still a good friend today and he had a 486 turbo PC with Doom 1 and 2. I finally got to play the game and it was mind blowing. I had never seen anything like it before. Sure there were some old polygon flight sims and the arcades were starting to see 3D games like Daytona and Ridge Racer but nothing moved as fast as this at home and presented a world that felt so tangible. We would stop in some levels and just admire the light sourcing which was a big buzz word at the time.

Of course the whole 3D aspect was a lie thanks to the amazing programming skills of John Carmack. The whole game was 2D but used clever perspective effects to give the illusion of 3D. It wasn't the first engine to do this and arguably the earlier ultima underworld had a more advanced engine with rooms over rooms and sloped surfaces. However Underworld ran like a dog even on the most high end machine, Doom dispensed of such extravagances to generate much bigger environments and run at a blistering pace even on a 386.

Doom does not get enough credit for just how well designed it is. While old FPS games like Goldeneye or Soldier of Fortune seem like relics and are hard to go back to Doom still feels fresh and relevant to this day. I think this is due to how no other game has replicated the gameplay of Doom, it still remains a unique experience. In the race to make games look better, character models have increased in complexity meaning there are less of them on screen. Dooms simple sprites meant you could fill the world with as many as you liked with little performance impact. It also had emergent elements with certain enemies fighting each other when damaged. This feature became the focal point of many stages in Doom 2. Also Doom had some actually gods honest level design, something which separates it from the dull story tubes of today where developers are too afraid to let players get lost for a while. Pretenders to the crown such as Serious Sam and Painkiller are just arena shooters with no sense of level design. This is where John Romero deserves a lot of the credit although he wasn't the only designer on the project. Doom is a real lesson in excellent level design and many of the best maps are still burned into my brain. It's only really been bettered by its direct sequel Doom 2 which explored more of the unusual aspects of the game engine with enemy infighting, verticality and changing elevations. It also introduced the most satisfying fps weapon of all time, the double barrel shotgun.

Mention must go out to the enemy and weapon load out of the game. Doom just had a great mix of enemy types that never got boring to fight. This was expanded again in Doom 2 with even more nasties like the annoying rev enacts and mancubi. Doom was the first game where I've ever been impressed by its weapons. They seemed outrageous at the time but slowly ended up a little tame until the modern day where they are back to being outrageous next to the plethora of boring real world guns that only different in stats. Every weapon was satisfying to use takes to meaty sound effects and each one had a use. Who can forget picking up the chainsaw for the first time and rampaging through enemies, the crack of the ever dependable shotgun, the deadly rocket launcher that ended up killing you more times than the enemies ( splash damage hurting the player seemed mind blowing at the time) and of course the room clearing BFG with an acronym that made schoolkids giggle when the found out what it stood for.

Doom should also be celebrated for the other two big changes it brought to videogames, multiplayer and modding. It wasn't the first game to offer networked multiplayer or the first to be modded but it was the game to popularise them and have communities form around them. Doomed death match over serial of LAN meant many an office worker naughtily raking up hours of over time while playing a sneaky game of death match Doom in the 90s. Co-op mode was also exceptional and I still play it every so often with friends. Not bad for a feature added at the eleventh minute. Modding was also a huge part of the game and built in as standard. Sound and graphics files could be easily replaced or expanded and level 'WAD' files could be easily created by amateurs leading to a massive community of level designers that still make levels today. Even more impressive are the total conversions that turn Doom into a completely different game. Form the excellent aliens total conversion, terrible Sonic fan made games and even the recent Brutal Doom which ups the violence to ridiculous levels (unfortunately the author is a total dildo) levels are still being made today, even John Romero returned to make one just last week.

So Doom for me is not only a classic but an a ageless one which is rare for such an early 3D game. It had a massive impact on the industry and turned PC gaming into a viable platform. It arguably kick started the golden age of PC game during the 90s that saw the PC receive some of its best games and the formation of genres such as the MMO, real time western RPG games and real time strategy. Also before the term first person shooter was coined, these games were referred to as Doom clones, Doom was so big it was synomynous with the genre.

One last thing, let's not forget Edge magazine's 7/10 review of the game, another case of its reviews getting it outrageously wrong. It called it a fairly simple 3D maze adventure, missing the point that the simplicity and fast hectic gameplay is what made it special. Then the reviewer lamented why you couldn't talk to the monsters.... It's kind of understandable since ultima underworld was released before Doom but is still just plain idiotic.

I felt Duke and Doom were very different. Duke had very few enemies on screen and you had to be very careful unlike doom which was a much faster and purer games. Also after the awesome shareware levels Duke 3D kind of gets a bit crappier due to the poorer level design. When it comes to build engine games I always preferred Shadow Warrior and the amazing Blood.

I wasn't a big fan of the PS1 conversion. Frame rate was a bit muck and some of the bigger levels the PS1 couldn't handle were cut down or replaced with much poorer ones. I suppose it was a hell of a lot better than the pish we got on saturn and 3DO. The soundtrack was great though.