As ingrained into gaming culture as the original Doom is; with it setting the trend for modern shooters yet itself remaining a simplistic, fun and fast experience, it's almost a video game faux pas to have missed out on playing it. With that said, I recently picked up Doom on the Xbox Marketplace and decided to play through to see just how much it has influenced shooters of today.
What hits your eyes right off the bat, even before you've gotten past the menu screen are the graphics. It's expected that they would be blocky and unappealing by today's standards because the only thing that has held up from 1993 is yours truly. Those "unappealing" graphics, however overshadowed by later advancements they became, have a certain charm to them: maybe its to do with the basic level of art design and the fact that everything looked the same, resulting in a lot of aimless running around trying to find the right key for whatever door you just ran past, but that was part of the challenge right?
Getting away from the graphics that look like the inside of an Atari, one of the other defining features of Doom is the inability to aim. Sounds like a bad thing but it aids the simplicity; no fiddly COD-like reflexes needed, just point in the general direction of the enemy and shoot. Speaking of shooting, the plethora of weapons you can acquire will, I'm sure, keep the attention of most players. As you go from pinging away at a demon with your pistol to giving a zombie man both barrels of your shotgun, carving your way through hoards of enemies wielding a chainsaw to finally redecorate the hallways with their blood by using the BFG, there is plenty to keep any shooter enthusiast happy.
While you're running around causing all this mayhem, you will need to find coloured keys to progress through the levels, it's not all massacring and games you know. Not all of the doors further the game though, some are secrets containing weapons, armour, or just a load more enemies for you to kill. It's not just obvious doors either, there are loads of secrets hidden behind what look like plain walls or raised platforms that can opened or descended by pressing a button or as part of the level progression. All of this results in nothing but fuel for completionists so they can get that sweet 100% a the end of a level.
On with the story and...there isn't one really. Well that's not fair but no one would blame you for missing it. Most of the story is given to you in the instruction manual of the physical game (which I don't have) however a quick trip to Wikipedia solves that, and the rest is given to you in between episodes in the form of overly-long text screens.
In short, you're a space marine working with the UAC, a military orginisation that's secretly experimenting with teleportation between the moons of Mars; Phobos and Deimos.
You are posted to Mars as part of the UAC security team but, as it always does, something goes horribly wrong with the experiment. Deimos disappears while demons, hell-spawn and other unknown evils are let loose on Phobos. You and you're team are tasked with defending Phobos but you soon find yourself alone as the rest of your team foolishly run in and get dealt with sharpish. It's a pretty standard plot but like I said before it doesn't really play much in the actual game, it's more just background to flesh out this 2.39MB fast paced shooting gallery.
Shooters have obviously changed since the time of Doom's breakneck, blood spattered, 90's sci-fi-horror shooter model, but every now and again you can see glimpses of the old guard in some of today's modern shooters. From the array of weapons; be it war time models or pew pew laser guns, to intense swarms of enemies and dodging bullets with the reaction time of a paranoid gnat, or just having a contrived and unnecessary plot. If you look closely enough, all the new boys owe at least something to the original FPS master, DOOM.
What hits your eyes right off the bat, even before you've gotten past the menu screen are the graphics. It's expected that they would be blocky and unappealing by today's standards because the only thing that has held up from 1993 is yours truly. Those "unappealing" graphics, however overshadowed by later advancements they became, have a certain charm to them: maybe its to do with the basic level of art design and the fact that everything looked the same, resulting in a lot of aimless running around trying to find the right key for whatever door you just ran past, but that was part of the challenge right?
Getting away from the graphics that look like the inside of an Atari, one of the other defining features of Doom is the inability to aim. Sounds like a bad thing but it aids the simplicity; no fiddly COD-like reflexes needed, just point in the general direction of the enemy and shoot. Speaking of shooting, the plethora of weapons you can acquire will, I'm sure, keep the attention of most players. As you go from pinging away at a demon with your pistol to giving a zombie man both barrels of your shotgun, carving your way through hoards of enemies wielding a chainsaw to finally redecorate the hallways with their blood by using the BFG, there is plenty to keep any shooter enthusiast happy.
While you're running around causing all this mayhem, you will need to find coloured keys to progress through the levels, it's not all massacring and games you know. Not all of the doors further the game though, some are secrets containing weapons, armour, or just a load more enemies for you to kill. It's not just obvious doors either, there are loads of secrets hidden behind what look like plain walls or raised platforms that can opened or descended by pressing a button or as part of the level progression. All of this results in nothing but fuel for completionists so they can get that sweet 100% a the end of a level.
On with the story and...there isn't one really. Well that's not fair but no one would blame you for missing it. Most of the story is given to you in the instruction manual of the physical game (which I don't have) however a quick trip to Wikipedia solves that, and the rest is given to you in between episodes in the form of overly-long text screens.
In short, you're a space marine working with the UAC, a military orginisation that's secretly experimenting with teleportation between the moons of Mars; Phobos and Deimos.
You are posted to Mars as part of the UAC security team but, as it always does, something goes horribly wrong with the experiment. Deimos disappears while demons, hell-spawn and other unknown evils are let loose on Phobos. You and you're team are tasked with defending Phobos but you soon find yourself alone as the rest of your team foolishly run in and get dealt with sharpish. It's a pretty standard plot but like I said before it doesn't really play much in the actual game, it's more just background to flesh out this 2.39MB fast paced shooting gallery.
Shooters have obviously changed since the time of Doom's breakneck, blood spattered, 90's sci-fi-horror shooter model, but every now and again you can see glimpses of the old guard in some of today's modern shooters. From the array of weapons; be it war time models or pew pew laser guns, to intense swarms of enemies and dodging bullets with the reaction time of a paranoid gnat, or just having a contrived and unnecessary plot. If you look closely enough, all the new boys owe at least something to the original FPS master, DOOM.
On the whole, DOOM has played a big part in the evolution of shooters throughout the years and, even if it might not look it, modern shooters like Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo all have DOOM to thank for having the chance to grace our consoles and PC's and providing the inspiration for what has become a much more refined genre in gaming.
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