DooM thread

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I'll have to admit I only like DooM II for the Super Shotgun.

Hey, Bigmouth, have you played DooM 64? If you have, what is your opinion on it?

I emulated Doom 64 a long time ago, I remember it being really dark. It's on my backlog alongside the Aliens TC, Chex Quest, and Final Doom. I also want to play through Doom II with the Vanilla or Chocolate engine some time, mainly so I can finally beat the Icon of Sin the "proper" way without using mouselook or noclip.

I personally found Doom 2 to be better over 1 for a very simple reason:

Larger monster variety. A game like that, much of it is very, very dependent on that aspect. And 2 added a bunch of interesting new foes here, so there's more variety to the combat. It also added quite a few new things to the game engine itself, though those wont be apparent (or known at all) to many players.

I figure, it's basically the same game + new stuff, when not thinking about the levels themselves, so there's little reason for me NOT to like it. What I dont like with sequels is when they CHANGE something that was already there and didnt need to be changed. Doom 2, fortunately, did not make this mistake. It JUST added stuff.

People will sometimes complain about a sequel having nothing new to it other than some additions to it, but I find DooM II good as it is right now, at least it didn't go the complete sequel overhaul if you know what I mean.

As for my opinion on DooM 64, I think it is a great N64 classic and it's personally my favorite out of the DooM games made with id Tech 1, combined with the ominous ambient music, advanced colored lighting, and scripting, this is my favorite DooM game.

Oh yeah, Doom was a huge advance over Wolf3d, no doubt of it. I do think Wolf 3d was a really great game for what it was, it was just outdated pretty quickly by Doom.



Well, it wasn't me, it was someone in our group. I've got no idea if the salespeople minded but around that time the only people buying 10 packs of LAN cards were probably people setting up office networks or people wanting them for a quick Doom meetup, and a geeky college student probably would be assumed by the salespeople to be the latter, but the guy in our group who did it apparently got away with it.



Interesting. I certainly don't remember Descent coming out before Quake necessarily, but do know those were out around the same time. Descent was a great game too but darned hard, like after you completed the level you had to do a mad dash to the exit against a timer before everything blew up, and controlling that ship was not easy. I just remember it was incredibly easy to get disoriented in that game - turned around, upside down with no idea where the enemies were. It must have been one of the first games that could take advantage of the (by today's standards) primitive 3d cards of that time like the Voodoo 3d. I guess it played without it but when I finally got a 3d card the lighting effects in that game were so much better than without one, it was like a whole new experience. Also, maybe I'm remembering incorrectly but seems to me that Descent used a licensed copy of the Quake engine? Or maybe that was another game - I wan't to say it was called Forsaken or Heretics or something like that - it used the Quake engine but it was more of a D&D style game.



Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to say Doom 1 was better - at the end of the day Doom 2 is probably better overall, it just did not live up to the anticipation and the hype, I'd say.



Can't help you there. I did read Usenet around that time but Usenet was divided into so many thousands of forums, I doubt I was even reading the pertinent ones.

Hexen II used the Quake engine, and Heretic II used the Quake II engine, so when you mention "D&D style", those are probably the games you're thinking of. The engine used by Descent was pretty advanced for 1995, but it was definitely more primitive than the Quake engine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_%2 ... #Rendering

I often wonder why the DooM engine was as limited as it was. It was BSP-based, but it couldn't do room-over-room, and paradoxically, unlike the earlier Wolfenstein 3D engine, it didn't support pushwalls either. This makes the hidden Wolfenstein-themed levels on DooM II feel kind of weird, since the doors slide upwards instead of to the side. The walls and everything are way taller too.

Dear god, I'm on E3M6 (Mt. Erebus), and I f*****g HATE this level. I mean, it's a unique map and it would probably be great for deathmatch, but on singleplayer I just find myself running in circles trying not to die or run out of ammo. There's also this room where when you go in it, even after you kill everything there's no way out, and I can't find a switch for the life of me. The next time I play I'll take a screenshot so you guys can see what I'm talking about.

^^ I remember that level. Its the one with the skins all over the walls, right?

From what I've read, wasn't DOOM originally only available as shareware (which you could then order the full version), and DOOM ][ was released commercially?

I wasn't into PCs at the time, so I don't know how true it is.

It certainly didn't suffer because of this, though Duke 3D used hacks to fake room-over-room and underwater areas. I think it would have made the automap a little more confusing...and look at today's games, they can all do room-over-room, but most of them don't really bother. Not a lot of Z action in most games.

It's the one that takes place in a volcanic crater, and there are skin textures on a lot of the walls, like some of the other levels in "Inferno".



That was the case. DooM 1 wasn't released as an on-the-shelf retail product until "The Ultimate DooM" in 1995. This is probably part of the reason why DooM II was more popular, as it was available retail upon release, and most people probably didn't want to bother with mail-ordering the full version of the first game.



There are a number of levels, particularly on the in the 2nd and 3rd episodes, that allude to overlapping areas, but don't really have them due to the limitations. I think it would have been neat if they figured out a way to hack them in, but I can understand why they didn't, as it already had enough trouble running well on the 386 machines of the time.

I like the way Duke3D handled room-over-room, even though I understand it's not as seamless as what later games would do. It works well enough that you barely even notice it, save for when you blow open that manhole cover on E1M2 and jump down into the sewer. It didn't really make the automaps much more complicated than the ones on DooM, in my opinion, though from playing Descent II which is much more RoR-heavy (and also using an actual "3D" engine), I can see how an automap in such a game could be confusing.

Modern shooters have crap level design. They put all of the detail into the graphics, but not the actual level architecture. One of the things I like about older shooters, and DooM in particular, is that the levels can be incredibly sprawling and complex with a lot of things to explore, and they aren't just a series of linear corridors with some nice-looking foliage. You actually have to use your brain to figure out a typical DooM level. Unfortunately, the trend of dumbing down the level design began as early as Quake, when they decided to remove the "use" key and thus killed the potential for a lot of puzzles in the process. It seems like a small thing, but DooM levels tend to have more traps and puzzles built into them, and I like that.

Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 26 Sep 2014, 2:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

I know what you mean, I remember first playing Quake on DOSBox, and it may not seem like it, but having the doors and switches being used automatically was sort of a big change to me since I'm always used to pressing whatever key I have for "use" in Doom. I kinda hated it, to be honest, because I would always end up pressing my "use" key, only to realize in a matter of seconds that the doors and switches were automatic.

At least they kept switches that would activate when you fired at them.

I remember once someone made a sort of DooM II for the Atari Jaguar, it was made through hex-editing the original Doom 1 Jaguar Port (I saw a video of it on YouTube, you'll need to take your time looking for the video itself, though), but DooM II itself was never released for the Jaguar by id Software or anyone else that worked on the Jaguar Port.

They could have done a lot more with the shootable switches on Quake, but they didn't. I think it's because Quake's development was rushed to a certain degree; they were originally going to make it an action platformer, then an RPG, then they changed it to a shooter at the last minute.

Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 24 Sep 2014, 10:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.