Hello and welcome to a really late Nostalgia World. I’m marking this NSFW as there are a couple of swears below. I’ve been ill with manflu or a cold and sinus infection combined, depending on how manly I feel, so it’s really knocked me for six. Unfortunately, most medication doesn’t help me, and short of jamming a Zelda-style heart up my nose in an attempt to fix it, I’ll probably still be ill for a while. Unless somebody has a Cerebral Bore from Turok 2 that they’re willing to lend me, which might work.
Anyway, enough of me bitching about my illness, and onto the review this week. I was originally going to do Resident Evil for the Playstation, after one of my friends pointed out that I mentioned him about 6 times in the last Nostalgia World, so as a sort of homage/collaborative effort, I was going to do Resi Evil 1 with him, as he is a massive Resi Evil nut. Unfortunately, events conspired, namely the illness and other stuff, so I’m not doing Resi Evil this week, it may be done next week.
I’m doing Doom this week. You may have guessed from the title and the pic above.
Doom is a classic, no doubt about it. Spanning 17 years of various editions and platforms, where I’ve either got the game itself for a particular platform, or have played on the game enough to not require buying it, Doom has stood the test of time easily in my opinion. Who can forget E1M1, standing in the hanger with that iconic midi music hammering away at them? Granted though nowadays, midi tends to sound like a dodgy 80s pop band playing away in a tin bath in a cave underground, but growing up, the soundtrack was, and still is, awesome.
The simplicity of Doom is one of its key elements to it. There’s a very basic plot, consisting of: Demons! On Phobos! Kill them all, space marine! (Yeah, there’s a bit more, about how the UAC you’ve been assigned to are messing around with teleportation and suchlike but that’s just a tiny bit of background info), and with that, you’re thrown into the game. There are no other survivors, despite what the box art may show, it’s just you and the demons, so open fire on everything there.
You get a range of weapons, but really, you only need one. The shotgun. The shotgun is your workhorse weapon, being capable of decimating the weaker demons and possessed marines in one hit if you get close enough, and capable of destroying anything else with a few more shots. Sure, you’ll get other weapons, but ammo is scarce for them all bar the pistol and the shotgun, and since the shotgun is more powerful than the pistol, it’s easy to see which one you should pick.
Ah, old faithful. In about a minute, everything in this room will be dead bar the space marine
The weapons of Doom are iconic, from the shotgun to the rocket launcher to the chainsaw, and any gamer worth his or her salt should recognise a BFG 9000 if it’s put in front of them. Capable of decimating a room of enemies in one hit, the BFG 9000 is the original supergun. Still the best as far as I’m concerned. Oh, you may have your portal nuke cannons and your flamethrowers in your games nowadays, but if you need a room of enemies dead, you turn to the big daddy, the Big Fucking Gun 9000. Oh yes. It clears rooms very, very efficiently.
I know, the demotivator is from the film. But we fucking love the BFG.
The graphics were good for its time, providing 3D as opposed to the usual 2D, and were shockingly violent for the time period, as it was one of the first games to feature gibbing, where if you hit your opponent with enough firepower, they’d explode into a meaty mess of giblets. Great. There’s nothing quite like firing rockets into a bunch of imps and watching them disintegrate from the sheer firepower and horrific violence you’ve unleashed on them. My personal favourite is acquiring the berserk powerup, grabbing as much health as possible beforehand, before leaping into a pack of imps and exploding them with my bare fists. Classic carnage.
Say, anyone got any nachos for all this salsa?
The level designs reflect the story, starting off industrialized as you’d expect, and slowly becoming more grotesque and horrific the closer you get to hell, until at last, you end up in what appears to be Cthulu’s basement, blasting the absolute shit out of everything around you. You also get around the levels by teleporting at times, reflecting the fact that the UAC were working on teleportation technology before everything went to hell. Or rather, just Deimos. See what I did there? Yeah, I’m going to go BFG myself for that pun.
Unlike modern games, your health is a percentage, and will only recover if you find medpacks around, which are easy to get in the easier difficulty levels but are less easy to find in the higher levels. It forces you to play tactically, as you can’t just waltz in and blow the living hell out of everything and then proceed onto the next fight after waiting to recover. For a little touch, the status bar face changes to reflect how badly injured you are, which was a nice touch. He also grins whenever you get a new weapon, which is always good fun.
The average space marine always looks bored, even when killing the legions of hell
I’ve spent about 11 years playing Doom, and its never lost its charm. It’s great for both a quick, five minute messy killathon or a longer period of time sat killing everything and trying to locate the keys to open the doors around the levels. Although one thing did bug me? Why the hell did the keys keep disappearing in between levels? Surely that would have made getting around the base absolutely hellish, as you’d have to go find someone with the red key, get them to unlock a door for you and carry on until you needed the blue keycard. Or perhaps everyone carried all three keys with them at all times, in which case, why can’t I loot their corpses to just steal their keys from them?
You bastards were never around when I needed you!
Being ill lately has left me not wanting to do much, so I’ve been sat playing Doom a lot. That and Left 4 Dead, but as L4D is A) a modern game and therefore doesn’t qualify for this, and B) glitchy as all hell with the new DLC, I’ve been enjoying Doom a lot more. Even if the bloody spiderdemon does keep utterly destroying me every time I so much as look at it closely. Tune in next week for some Resi Evil fun, where assuming I’ve not turned into a zombie, me and a friend will be shooting lots of them.
