Doom

Well, it's been a long time, since I've reviewed a classic PC game, but this is a good one to come back on. This Sunday is Father's Day, and one of my most prominent memories of my adolescence is my dad and I playing a certain computer game. A game that single-handedly popularized both online gaming, and the first-person shooter genre. A game blamed for lost productivity, and -- less intelligently -- for violence among teenagers, including a spike in mass shootings. A game that is also celebrating its 20th anniversary, this year. I'm talking about DOOM.

One can be understood for thinking there's no story, to this game, as a handful of text screens are all that we get, in the game itself. According to the manual, though, this is the setup: it's the near-to-distant future, and you play an ex-Marine deposited on Mars, for assaulting a superior officer wanting to fire on unarmed civilians. While the outpost is normally boring in the extreme, that changes when the United Aerospace Corporation conducts teleportation experiments, on the moons... and something demonic manages to come through.

In the ensuing fury, the Phobos base is overrun, and Deimos seems to have completely vanished. When the fireteam sent to Phobos is wiped out, it falls upon you, to pick up where they left off.

The game's original version is divided into three episodes (the first being the shareware version), each one covering nine levels on Phobos, Deimos, and Hell (the updatedUltimate Doom adds a fourth episode, set on Earth). While you can play these episodes in any order that you like, they do get progressively harder in sequence. The gameplay is so simplistic that it has been satirized many times: go into spooky place, find monsters, kill them, repeat. While the sheer numbers and firepower exerted by the zombies, demons, and other assorted monsters can be diabolical, most of the time they can be handled. This is because -- due to the technology of the time -- the monsters themselves aren't all that bright.

What can make the game mildly deeper than a mere shoot and loot, is the ways in which you can toy with and exploit the monsters. Very often, the monsters aren't too choosy on who they try to eviscerate, so as long as you've stirred up monsters of differing species then you can simply get out of the way and let natural selection take its course. In a less sadistic way (arguably), you can take advantage of the fact that the monsters' tactics basically consist of spotting you, following you, and trying to kill you. So if you can get a lot of them bottlenecked in a corridor and put some distance between you...

In its main element -- action and horror -- Doom very much succeeds. Even after all this time, even with the horror and violence bars being raised to the Nth degree, by media and real life alike... it is still intense, shocking, unsettling, and just plain heart-pounding. I've played this game, its sequel, and various fan-made levels countless times, and it is still incredibly exciting. The graphics are a bit primitive, by today's standards, but they are very colourful and well-drawn. The monsters and levels are very creatively designed, the sounds just plain terrifying at times, and the weapons purely awesome. And the music may be MIDI tracks, but they beg to be played on the best available sound cards.

I've even had a bit of experience, with the Deathmatch and co-op multiplayer modes... frankly I can't imagine hunting down your buddies in some of the larger levels, given that you can only play with 4 people at the most, but if you've never done on-line shooters before this is a great way to wet your feet. And for the record, yes I do find Deathmatch a lot more fun -- even a dumb human is going to be much more challenging to "kill" than the toughest of these monsters.

I suppose I should put on my Bored on the Corner hat, for a moment, to address the so-called controversial content. The game features plenty of demonic and Satanic elements, which have been attacked relentlessly by the Christian Right... completely ignoring that these elements ARE FROM THE BAD GUYS. Honestly, that speaks for itself. As for the violence... yes, it's gory. In its time, Doom probably was the most violent game of its time. However, there have been many studies into this issue, and NONE of them has found a link between violent gaming tastes, and overly violent behaviour. I've said my own piece about how non-violent I am, despite having grown up with games like this, but I can take it even further: I know several people who have played these sort of games to some extent, and I only know two of them, who have handled guns in any way whatsoever.

And one of those people, hates first-person shooters, because they make her motion sick.

ANYWAY! Doom is one of those games that was not only very popular, but truly set a standard. Unreal, Halo, Call of Duty, and countless other games owe their existence to the mammoth success of this one. You can find it ANYWHERE on the web now -- from Abandonware pages, to the Xbox Marketplace, to Steam -- and fan-made levels and mods are still being made to this day. As long as you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend checking it out.