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mtc50's DOOM (PC)
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| [April 17, 2009 11:00:43 AM]
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DOOM
-= Overview =-
Doom is the best 4 megabyte game I have ever downloaded, by far! The shareware screens give me a sense of nostalgia for an era that has long since changed to featureless-levelless trials and nag screens. The game is fully featured and this particular version is bundled with a loading screen that allows you to choose what level to load and has some other options to change in the game.
-= Story =-
The main idea of the story is that you are YOU. The main character never speaks, you never see his/her face (except in the health meter), and s/he does not have a name. This is intentional in order to get the player more immersed in the story. If you want to know the story, you actually have to look at the manual (or read Wikipedia), but the basic idea is that you are a space marine who assaulted a higher ranking officer. You, of course, are the good guy in the conflict as you were doing what is "right". So they shipped you off to Mars and the two moons of Mars to partake in your adventure. You eventually end up in Hell, too, by the way. There are lots of monsters overrunning Mars and its moons because of teleportation experiments having something to do with hell, and only YOU can send them all back to hell---with your guns.
-= Graphics & Sound =-
The graphics in Doom are not great by today's standards, but for 1993, they are AWESOME! The levels have dynamic lighting on all the sprites based on how many windows and lights are around. Now that I've mentioned sprites, the graphics are actually all 2-Dimensional images unlike typical 3-D models that you see in games nowadays. Every once in a while this will break the sense of true 3-D-ism, but for the most part you won't notice unless you're looking for it. Where you will notice the 3-D features lacking is when you attempt to aim at enemies above or below you in the level. You actually don't have to aim up or down at all. One neat feature that this 2-D leveling provides is that all the levels can be represented in 2-D for the automap feature. Many current games have a confusing automap feature because rooms are on top of other rooms and showing the "depth" of the adjacent rooms is sometimes confusing.
The sound of Doom is not as great as the graphics. It does have sound, but the background music gets somewhat annoying at times. I imagine this music wouldn't get as annoying if I could beat the levels anywhere close to the "par" time, so maybe it is my fault I don't like the music. The sound effects aren't too bad, on the other hand. Allegedly Doom is the first widespread game to use stereo sound so you can tell if enemies are hurting you from the left or right.
-= Gameplay =-
The controls are intuitive because practically every other FPS since Doom has had similar controls. Unfortunately the mouse drivers on Windows have been updated in the past 15 years, so the mouse wasn't working in this version! This was a very annoying feature because strafing was so difficult to do on the keyboard. In general, the game play was very intuitive and straightforward: kill everything, find an exit sign.
-= First Gameplay Session =-
My first attempt at playing Doom (in the past decade) was frustrating. Why does my mouse not work? Why doesn't Windows use .VXD drivers anymore? Ugh. So figuring out the keyboard controls wasn't bad. Arrow keys make sense. Space and Ctrl do everything else, except strafe which has 2 different possibilities: hold alt while pressing left-right or use comma and period. I repeatedly tried both ways and neither one was easy to use while my fingers were on the other keys. Anyway, I played on the easiest mode and it was fairly difficult to die, so I was able to play until I just got tired and had other things to do. The first level was straight forward to find all the various rooms and get to the exit, but some of the other levels were confusing and I would get turned around a lot until I figured out how to use the auto-map. Finding keys and exits becomes much easier if you use the automap.
-= Second Gameplay Session =-
The second gameplay session consisted of me trying out a later level on the hardest difficulty, where I immediately died, so I went back to super-easy mode. Then I tried to make my stats at the end of a level better. So I found where all the secrets were, and tried to kill all the enemies, and tried to explode or pick up all the items. At this point, I realized that beating the level in par time was possible but only if you memorized where everything was and didn't try to do anything else. Some of the secrets aren't too difficult to find if you watch for different textures on the walls and use the automap to look for extra pieces of walls.
-= Summary =-
In summary, Doom is a great game that many other games have been based from. So many games were copies of Doom that the phrase "Doom Clone" was a nickname for all the other FPS games in that time period. Doom was so well built that even after 15+ years it is still fun to play and works on new hardware with only a few minor glitches.
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mtc50's DOOM (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Friday 17 April, 2009
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