Game Debate #66: Doom

[Reed Rothchild | 9,525]

 

 

[sp1nz | 612]

DOOM and DOOM II are both quintessential FPSes in my eyes. DOOM (2016) is great too but I prefer the original 2 for having a laser focus on gameplay; no dialogues, no upgrade menus, no journal entries etc. The original DOOM still makes me RIP AND TEAR with glee. DOOM is the bees knees compared to other build engine games and many more advanced FPS games out there. Been playing the first two DOOMs on and off for over 25 years and I ain't gonna stop.

10/10 for the OG and 8/10 for the modern variety.

[docile tapeworm | 4,198]

i remeber the first time i saw doom. i like doom. i think doom is historical.

[TDIRunner | 2,735]

The timing for this is perfect because I just happened to be in the middle of another play through of Doom and Doom II.  I'm currently playing it on PS3 playing Doom Classic Complete. 

I honestly consider the original Doom to be one of my favorite games of all time.  The nostalgic factor is pretty high with that one.  I remember playing it and being scared out of my mind.  It seems a bit funny to think bout it that way now, but at the time I hadn't seen anything else like it.  I have to give it a 10.

Doom 2016 was also a great game and I was so happy that they didn't ruin it.  I think we all expected it to be another Duke Nukem Forever and it was amazing to discover that it was a great game.  I still prefer the original, but it's still fun to pickup and play even though I'm not very good at it.  I probably have to give Doom 2016 an 9.    

[Tanooki | 4,933]

Original Doom 10/10... Do I really need to explain this one?  That would be like trying to explain why people lose their minds over stuff like Tetris, Super Mario Bros, and a few other notables.

Doom 2016 though, 4.5/10 (rounded to a 5)  It's between meh with better choices, and being ok with usually mostly having better things to do.  Why?  Dramatic me saying it, but well, they kinda blew smoke on this one.  Talked about going back to how it was...eh, not really.  They also added some really aggravating, repetitive annoying required crap to do (glory kills) over and over with the very limited low fuel use chainsaw just to get enough ammo/armor items along with health packs to keep going.  That one shitty dynamic really sucked my interest out of the game a lot, I don't like the dynamic it forces at all.  The stages are nice, the story works, love the atmosphere, visuals, audio...but that crap, along with the really grating scattered level ups with some pretty steep timed things to pull off of fail it for good stuff really sucks.

It put me off the game bad enough even as deep as sales cut it now, I have no interest in Eternal.  It also put me where I'd rather keep the Switch version for ease, and erased the Steam release because to me, it's a large waste of space on a 1TB drive I have.

[cj_robot | 542]

Are you kidding me?!? 10 outta freakin 10!

For me, it's up there with games like Super Mario World, Streets of Rage 2, and a handful of others that I could just play over and over again forever and never get tired of it.

Awesome atmosphere, great music, incredible level design, spot-on controls... it's like everything was crafted to perfection. Crank up the difficulty and it gets very challenging, yet never feels unfair or impossible to beat.

Can't go wrong with the DOS original, but the PS1 version is also really cool for it's differences. I think I've played every console version, although I haven't finished them all (some just aren't worth it, tbh).

YES, I LIKE DOOM

 

Edit: Oh yeah, Doom 2016... not sure I'm meant to play this one. Bought it on PS4, waited quite awhile to try it, and discovered the disc wouldn't read. Was gifted it on steam and, after trying it for about an hour, my computer crashed and somehow that motherboard hasn't worked since. Don't know what's up, but someday I'll probably get back into it.

Edited September 10, 2021 by cj_robot

[Sumez | 2,950]

1993 - Great game, uses the first person perspective actively to its advantage rather than just being a default "because that's how the genre is". Very well done level design on most stages, that really think about how monsters spawn in relation to your positioning, requiring you to use the layout to your advantage.

9/10

2016 - Really good game, focused on action combat, and for the first time ever actually cool boss fights in an FPS. Overall though I think the game ended up feeling repetitive partially due to mostly identical locales, but also because combat doesn't rely much on the arena itself but more on just constantly moving, which means every fight in the game requires sort of the same approach. You don't fight enemies to progress, but stop in arenas and clean them out, and move on.
I also think it's weird how the game starts out mocking story exposition that breaks the flow of the game, but then later on it proceeds to do the exact same thing itself.

7/10

[ifightdragons | 234]

1 hour ago, Sumez said:

I also think it's weird how the game starts out mocking story exposition that breaks the flow of the game, but then later on it proceeds to do the exact same thing itself.

7/10

Nailed it

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

The original is a great game, but I've never played the remake. 8/10 for the 1993 version.

[noiseredux | 232]

6 hours ago, Sumez said:

1993 - Great game, uses the first person perspective actively to its advantage rather than just being a default "because that's how the genre is". Very well done level design on most stages, that really think about how monsters spawn in relation to your positioning, requiring you to use the layout to your advantage.

9/10

2016 - Really good game, focused on action combat, and for the first time ever actually cool boss fights in an FPS. Overall though I think the game ended up feeling repetitive partially due to mostly identical locales, but also because combat doesn't rely much on the arena itself but more on just constantly moving, which means every fight in the game requires sort of the same approach. You don't fight enemies to progress, but stop in arenas and clean them out, and move on.
I also think it's weird how the game starts out mocking story exposition that breaks the flow of the game, but then later on it proceeds to do the exact same thing itself.

7/10

This. Exactly.

[mbd39 | 2,020]

It's a seminal classic along the lines of Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter 2 and Tetris. You had to be there to know how mind blowing it was at the time. My friends and I obsessed over it. Doom gave birth to everything so it might not seem as special now. Still I give it a 10/10.

Never played the 2016 Doom.

 

 

Edited September 10, 2021 by mbd39

[Gloves | 11,777]

*ahem*

Never played it.

[Gentlegamer | 172]

In high school, some kid installed DOOM on a hidden directory on all the machines in the computer lab.

[ThePhleo | 2,184]

7 minutes ago, Gloves said:

*ahem*

Never played it.

 

Nope, coming out of vacation for this one. Forgive me @DefaultGen.

I was FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE accepting the fact that the evil overlord wasn't ostracized when it revealed it's still lurking in the shadows. But THIS!? Nope, unacceptable!

Doom is probably, no, DEFINITELY the most influential game of all time. You were alive when it was released and you've never played it?

I mean...at this point I have to question. Do you have video games? Do you have the ability to make a website? DO YOU EVEN OWN A PAIR OF GLOVES!!!!

Yeah it's a primitive game by today's standards but this game is more important than Pong, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Super Mario 64, and Mortal Kombat.....COMBINED.....AT LEAST 15 to 27 times over.

[DefaultGen | 5,403]

19 minutes ago, Gentlegamer said:

In high school, some kid installed DOOM on a hidden directory on all the machines in the computer lab.

We used to hide it in the recycling bin when the custodian came around to delete it, haha.

[Gloves | 11,777]

Just now, ThePhleo said:

 

Nope, coming out of vacation for this one. Forgive me @DefaultGen.

I was FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE accepting the fact that the evil overlord wasn't ostracized when it revealed it's still lurking in the shadows. But THIS!? Nope, unacceptable!

Doom is probably, no, DEFINITELY the most influential game of all time. You were alive when it was released and you've never played it?

I mean...at this point I have to question. Do you have video games? Do you have the ability to make a website? DO YOU EVEN OWN A PAIR OF GLOVES!!!!

Yeah it's a primitive game by today's standards but this game is more important than Pong, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Super Mario 64, and Mortal Kombat.....COMBINED.....AT LEAST 15 to 27 times over.

xD

I recognize its importance of course. We weren't well off, we didn't get new games regularly. Most of my games as a kid were traded for; the first game I owned was FF on NES, for which I traded some Pepsi pens.

Eventually I did play some Doom CLONES at a friends house; again though, myself and all of my friends' families were all pretty poor overall. We didn't actually play full PC games, we had shareware and that was about it, so we'd play the same first few levels of games over and over. Growing up I mostly played obscure games, not a lot of mainstream stuff.

I've been "catching up" over the last few years playing the "must-haves" for the systems I collect for.

[G-type | 2,481]

I was SUPER into Wolfenstein 3d. Played all 3 of the original episodes to completion, also got into the graphics hacking and making my own levels too. For some reason, Doom I only played casually, but I still recognize it as a great game and a big technological leap forward from Wolf3d

Edited September 10, 2021 by G-type

[DefaultGen | 5,403]

Doom is 10/10, my favorite computer game. I love the nonlinear exploration and individual levels. They can be big, open labyrinthine backtracking complexes or more linear action levels. There are gimmicky levels full of secrets and giant open rooms just full of a million dudes (more of that in Doom II really). You can spend an hour going through an episode taking your time exploring or you can crash through it at top speed and do every level in like 2 minutes. It's the full package. They literally and unfortunately don't make games like this anymore. The 3D maze aspect of FPS is almost completely gone now in favor of bad guys shooting galleries or an entire focus on multiplayer, and I personally loved the maze.

2016 Doom isn't really anything like Doom. It's like a Quake III/Serious Sam game with Martian horror paint on it. It's entirely linear with a bunch of single player Quake III jump pad arena battles. Still a super cool game because of how fast and violent it is. I'd personally take Quake or Quake III over it though. 8/10

[ThePhleo | 2,184]

7 minutes ago, Gloves said:

xD

I recognize its importance of course. We weren't well off, we didn't get new games regularly. Most of my games as a kid were traded for; the first game I owned was FF on NES, for which I traded some Pepsi pens.

Eventually I did play some Doom CLONES at a friends house; again though, myself and all of my friends' families were all pretty poor overall. We didn't actually play full PC games, we had shareware and that was about it, so we'd play the same first few levels of games over and over. Growing up I mostly played obscure games, not a lot of mainstream stuff.

I've been "catching up" over the last few years playing the "must-haves" for the systems I collect for.

I'm just poking at you. In all honesty, I've never watched some classic world class movies like Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Psycho, or The Sound of Music.

But then again I DON'T OWN A CLASSIC MOVIE FAN CLUB FORUM.

No...it's fine we're good.

 

Just go play Doom. Maybe play it using Brutal Doom mod, and look at all the wonderful indie game creations using the engine that are completely unrelated to Doom.

[DefaultGen | 5,403]

2 minutes ago, ThePhleo said:

Just go play Doom. Maybe play it using Brutal Doom mod, and look at all the wonderful indie game creations using the engine that are completely unrelated to Doom.

Don't ruin history the first time you play itttttttt. Brutal Doom is pretty cool though.

[Gloves | 11,777]

I had planned to play it eventually, but I seem to recall reading that the SNES version was the worst version. Is that true?

[DefaultGen | 5,403]

3 minutes ago, Gloves said:

I had planned to play it eventually, but I seem to recall reading that the SNES version was the worst version. Is that true?

Yes, all the versions not on PC are the worst version (Actually I think @Sumez corrected me a while ago that the latest console versions made in Unity are excellent now).

[Reed Rothchild | 9,525]

30 minutes ago, Gloves said:

I had planned to play it eventually, but I seem to recall reading that the SNES version was the worst version. Is that true?

I can't image a worse version...

http://snesrankings.com/games/375_351.html#357

[TDIRunner | 2,735]

39 minutes ago, Gloves said:

I had planned to play it eventually, but I seem to recall reading that the SNES version was the worst version. Is that true?

Every home console version has issues, but they all have different weak points.  Depending on what is important to you, you might rank different ports as the worst.  SNES is probably the weakest from a visual perspective, but in terms of sound, I would say the 32x is the weakest, and the Jaguar port has no music, so you could also argue it's the weakest.  Regardless, SNES, 32x, Saturn, 3DO, Jaguar and PS1 all have some limitations.  PS1 is probably the closest to being faithful to the original release.  I left out N64 Doom as it's generally considered it's own game.  

[Gloves | 11,777]

Alright I've started playing the PC version. Will report back.