Be Excellent To Each Other

Turns out we're all old. Doom, eh? What a great game. But what if Doom were made today?

Doom is my most owned game. I think I own it 9 times across several formats.

It's brilliant isn't it?

I was at university when it came out, and a member of the computer club (we mostly played lots of computer games).

They had an Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, Atari ST and 2 PCs (a 486 and P75). I think someone brought doom in after Christmas and until that point most people crowded around the Amigas and STs with the occasional forray on to the PC.

When Doom came along, people instantly became more interested in that. It taught me about setting up IPX networks in dos, and about optimising sound card drivers. It taught me about batch files (I setup a batch file to copy my config and save files in before starting, and then out again when I'd finished).

I loved playing the single player, but when we had the network setup (and a 3rd pc was ordered) we played 3 player multiplayer and I was hooked.

I remember one particular game, I was playing against one of my friends, and it was first to 100 frags. I got up to 99-0 and then he killed me, and proceeded to get 10 more frags against me before I finally finished him off.

It almost certainly contributed to me dropping out of university after 2 years (and getting a fun, well paying job and meeting my wife) and then getting into quake, quakeworld and then quake3 and UT clans.

An absolutely amazing game, without it I would not be the person I am today.

Malc

I remember the first time I saw it running. My jaw was on the floor, it was precisely the game I'd been waiting years for. I used to love with Xybots in the arcade but it was a pretty crappy game, this was like a proper, not shit version of it.

If I remember rightly, this was the first game that made my Playstation crash.

There were loads of enemies on screen at the same time and it crashed out to a black screen with some red text on it. Can't remember what it said but I couldn't do anything apart from reset the console.

So there you go.. Not as interesting as Malcs story but a story all the same.

I can still remember buying an extra 4MB of RAM and a sound card for my parents' 486SX25 so I could play Doom 2.
Money well spent, and then when I went to university we used to sneak into the engineering department at night and use all the networked CAD PCs for multiplayer fun.

I've just played a bit of this on the 360. What a brilliant game!

SX?We had a DX, pauper.

That said, I did struggle by with a 386SX for a while. The combination of that and Falcon 3.0 (604k base required to play? Yes I'll fuck around with autoexec.bat and config.sys for ages sorting that one out. That's almost more fun than flying an F16. Anyone who says PCs are good for games anythingis a bloody idiot) made me hate IT forever.

We certainly felt poor having paid £1300 for the thing, though it did come with windows 3.1 and Office 5 on floppy disks!

£1300!?! Cripes.

If somone who knows is around, what were the costs of a "gaming" PC and a console back then? I seem to recall consoles being a lot more spenny than the PCs we had.

I built my gaming PC in 1996, I got one notch down from the best on everything (I did a lot of research) and it cost me about £1,000 I think, then very quickly I got a pure3d card from the USA (I actually bought 5, but sold 4 at the price that I paid for the 5), but that would have been an extra £250 or something.

It was very good and lasted me a good 4 years before I built another one.

I don't know before that though.

Malc

There was this graphic on Reddit t'other day.

It's in dollars rather than pounds, but you get the idea. The Neo Geo always struck me as scandalously priced as I thumbed disappointedly through Games-X.

http://i.imgur.com/nBN0mbS.jpg

I'm quite shocked at the relative cheapness of the n64, dreamcast and gamecube.

A Master System was £99.95.
A NES was £130 (I think - details are sketchy).
A Mega Drive was £189.99.
A SNES was £150.

Also this graph is interesting:


[edit]Bloody hell

Having played on mine recently, you'd be disappointed paying that much for a 3DO.

Interesting.

I'm also not sure why people's PC prices are so high for the 90s though. I'm sure we got the 386SX and 486DX for a couple hundred quid.

Because PCs are a sliding scale. Mine would play Doom sort of OK. If I wanted something that would play new games really well then it probably would have got more spendy.

Well, yes, I've bought and built a few over the years. but I don't recall the same type of Pc as Malc and zoidberg are talking about costing us that much. Maybe we bought them after they'd been out a while.

Anyway - a PC able to play most new games cost relatively little, I thought - certainly not 3DO levels of spenny.

They can cost not so much, but they don't tend to be very good. My current one cost about £1,500 but it's three and half years old now and can still play the latest games turned up all the way at silly resolutions.

The 360 port of Doom 1 is awful because it only has really slow weapon cycling. If I'm using the rocket launcher and I'm charged by a Pinky, I need to quick switch to the chainsaw. It takes about ten seconds on the 360, by which point it's chewed your face off.

Doom 2 uses the d-pad for grouped weapon switching but it was never back ported. So instead I picked up Doom Classic Complete for PS3: Final Doom, Ultimate Doom, Doom II, the Master Levels, and the previously 360-only new campaign No Rest For The Living. And it's awesome. And the whole game has d-pad weapon switching. Heaven.

I meant 20 years ago! There weren't that many graffix options in Doom, IIRC.

No, but I had to use the screen size of a postage stamp to ensure it didn't run as a slideshow on my 386.

Fact: Doom is the Citizen Kane of video games.

My first foray into PC gaming came in the Pentium era so Doom certainly wasn't much of a problem. I do remember though having the odd fight with IRQ settings to get sound working which was fucking stupid. Also, amusingly, I played Quake through a few times without even realising you could use the mouse; I did everything on the keyboard, including adjusting my vertical viewing angle up every time an airborne enemy came on screen then just moving forward/backward to avoid his shots and line up my own. Christ, thinking how much more I'd have enjoyed the thing with mouselook still makes me feel like a tit about it to this day.

Playing fully 3D no-gravity shooter Descent with keyboard only was like mental torture. Using arrow keys, Z and X, and Page up and down JUST for movement!

Hardly surprising - Quake didn't really default to mouse controls. I remember having to dick about in the console to makes them workable (i.e. not having to hold down a button to make up/down on the mouse look up and down rather than the comically poor walk forward, backward) Was perfectly playable like that - and in doing so I was generally top of the scoreboard for (whatever the maximum players was) multiplayer.

It was actually Duke3D which caused me to learn to use mouse controls - which was something of a slow and painful process. Not helped by having the worlds most impractical for gaming trackball ever at home. Not that I was shabby before hand, but afterwards I became rather unbeatable. Not helped by the way that I was the only one using a mouse rather than a keyboard. (I seem to remember being inspired when looking at the options in the setup. As far as I knew I was the only one doing it, as no-one else I knew did and the games themselves were not really setup to use mouse out of the box. How naive I was)

Was it quake where you needed a console command to switch the crosshairs on?

I think the first FPS to get me mousing around was probably as late as Undying. Me and my mate played through it together and, although learning to use the mouse was pretty painful, you could tell almost instantly that it would be awesome control scheme once you were used to it.

Yes, it is.

Not the most elegant of crosshairs either.

all patched in later versions mind, esp Quake World!

Malc

I think PCs were about a grand and consoles around 300 in late 1990s.

Aye, up until recent history, common perception was that you would need to spend a grand to get a capable gaming PC, regardless of the stuff in it at the time, the cost stayed pretty constant with the upgrades. It's only relatively recently that the cost of getting a gaming PC has dropped considerably and you can get a reasonable machine now for around £500.

Didn't know there were multiple Amiga versions. I have ADoom but this one is far more optimised:

Doom...but on the Amiga?!

ASPLODE

I remember Gloom being rather terrible. Alien Breed 3D wouldn't run properly on my A1200.

Gloom was good for Doom, but on the A1200. Very low benchmark though, whether it would've been good had I not played doom, I have no idea, but as it stands I didn't much like it. AB3D was rather pap even for Doom, but on a postage stamp. Fears was worse than terrible.

Doom kind of passed me by, I was dedicated to the Amiga at the time (and TBH couldn't afford a viable PC), but even when I did get round to playing I didn't find it amazing. A bit too much wandering around and finding the right key to go in the right door, and dependent on finding secret passages and stuff. (I think I've always preferred the 'Max Payne' model, largely linear levels where the game is playing the game, rather than morosely trying to find things.)

As for gaming capable PCs, £1000 was basically your starter point right through the 90s and the 00s, although I remember paying over £2000 for a Pentium 200 MMX based PC in 1997, the CPU alone was nearly £600.

A few months later the Pentium II came out and made my system look a bit shit. That was the first and last time I ever bought at the cutting edge of PC technology.

I didn't much like Gloom but then I didn't much like Doom either. (I didn't like Quake either as a single player game, that only gained any traction with me as a multiplayer online game.)

I just don't like wandering aimlessly around trying to find stuff.

The perfect model for me would be something like Dishonored, where the choice of routes is fairly simple and obvious, but the skill and 'game' if you will is using your character and his toolbox to get through the section at hand.

I wouldn't say I'd prefer the 'modern' map in DocG's original post, but the one on the left (which I assume is one of the original Doom's levels) just makes me sigh in resignation. Somewhere between the two, but leaning towards the second, would suit me.

Puzzles piss me off as well, I only completed the original Portal by youtubing all the levels before doing them myself, and for Portal 2 I couldn't even be bothered to do that, I admired it, but I didn't like it at all.

I miss That Rev Chap. He would have said something super great about Doom then I could have just gone

Is that Amiga footage sped up? It's way too fast to be fun surely. I preferred the Jag version; that being the only version I've played.

Playing Doom and Final Doom solo on nightmare on PS1 back in the 90s and sinking hundreds of hours into ultra- competitive sweaty-palmed link-up one-on-one matches with my friends as a teenager was hugely enjoyable and is probably one of my most treasured gaming memories.

Shlck shlck BOOM!

It doesn't look too different from what I'm used to - maybe a little sped up. Maybe.

If you didn't always hold down the run key (assuming that made the port, as compared to a quake-esque autorun*), it'd look much faster than what you're used to.

* - according to this - http://www.gamefaqs.com/jaguar/563365-doom/faqs/1774 it was a separate button as far as I can tell - which would've made constant use somewhat tricky, and the jaguar was slower even without that.

Looks like it as his other video is slower and runs at the 16/18fps I'd expect on a 50MHz Amiga.

Don't be shocked about the latter. When it was released, the plan was for it to be relatively inexpensive. Which was mad considering how good it was.

The failure of the Dreamcast is still one of the biggest travesties of our time

Sega did royally fuck the whole thing up though in terms of marketing and advertising and plugging online play at a time when the internet was held together by bits of string and squawking modems.

IT'S AN ARCADE IN YOUR HOME FOR UNDER TWO HUNDRED QUID was how they should have sold it, of course.

I'm currently playing Final Doom, because I've never actually played that before (I watched a friend do a mission of it on his Playstation 1) and in doing so I will have finally completed all official dooms, excluding a lot of the dross in 'Maximum Doom'. I'm doing it using GZDoom + the BrutalDoom mod, because it the shotgun noises in it are great and I quite like the gore.

Q: Has anyone ever played Doom coop?

Yes. I didn't find it added particularly much. And if you're partnered with someone not competent enough, you end up with pistols only. Which really isn't too fun.

Bezzie co-op with an Dave, an Dimrill and an Meaty was fun back in the halcyon days.