Playing Doom after 30 years

Date: 2023-09-28

Doom and I have an interesting relationship over the decades. When I was a kid, I played it sometimes, but I really didn't like the cacodemon, so most of the time I just chickened out, and stopped playing when it appeared.

Of course as an adult, it's much different now, and I started playing again, on stream, and I have to say I am having a blast playing through. I am on the Ultimate Doom episode, number 4. Just playing on Hurt Me Plenty, cause I was never really good in first person shooters. It still gives me enough challenge, to enjoy it. Sometimes even restarting level, because I messed up somewhere, or I had low health for some segments of a map. The big goofballs doesn't scare me anymore, and I love my shotgun (but also plasma).

In the past decade or so, I thought that Doom and most iD Software games were just good tech demos, and other devs just expanded on it. But now that I played it extensively, I think Doom is genius. The level design, the enemy placement (the mixing of short and longer range enemies, or dropping big guys on you). People think that it has a weak story, but when a demonic attack is on your butt, you don't really need story. This is not Dark Forces, where you have intel for your next mission. DoomGuy is just rip and tear… because he must!

I am looking forward to finishing episode 4, then I move to Sigil. I checked it out a little bit recently, and oh man it's wild. I also discovered that John Romero streams on twitch, he is making Sigil 2 atm. It's very interesting to see a legend like him, making levels, live. If I could go back time and tell my younger self, he wouldn't believe it: "Hey I saw John Romero, building next level Doom maps, live via video."

I also discovered DOOMer77, who has a nice Doom musem in his home:

I enjoy streaming, although I wish I could play for more than 3-4 hours at a time. Right now I am just tired after 3 hours. I love playing Doom so much, that I looked into mapping, and maybe streaming some of it, as I learn it. Sadly I can't use Ultimate Doom Builder perfectly on Linux, and I could not install with Wine for some reason. So I will use Slade, which has native Linux support and looks and handles quite well.