This video (particularly the “clincher” moment you site in “new Doom”) is a great example of why I love your work so much. Brilliantly written, entertaining, accurate, insightful and (most importantly) full of heart and genuine enthusiasm for the medium. Basically, for what it’s worth, I think you are one of the best content creators working today. Long may you continue. I’ll be happy to contribute to your patreon.
Amazing work on this video. Despite there being a million retrospectives on Doom you managed to create one that feels fresh. I am a new subscriber and will definitely be binging on your past videos!
Kim! I've watched your videos a LOT in the last week or so. Utterly brilliant channel, bringing back so many memories. I'm 39 and a lot of your videos from the 90s strike a cord with me. LOVE the channel. Subscribed. Please keep up the good work.
*Great review,* and thanks for the trip down memory lane. 👍 The original Doom was *absolutely fucking brilliant,* and I played it far, far too much back in my University days. There was this point where I started to have "Doom dreams" ... which scared the hell out of me. Not because the dreams were scary, they were always just dreams about kicking monster arse, but because it represented an addiction that had gotten out of control. I had never been so obsessed by any game before, so I decided that it had to stop _immediately._ I really needed to pass exams, so I examined my priorities, went Doom cold - turkey, and never really got back in the saddle after my exams were over. Not even Doom 2 could rekindle the fire after that. But back when I was playing Doom all the time, I really fucking _loved_ it!
You forgot about the two aspects of the game that was present in the classics that made this one great. The non-linear maze like level design and the exploration aspects. Secret hunting is so satisfying in this game, because it's always something cool, like a bit of lore, an upgrade, a missable rune trial, or, best of all, a classic level. Sometimes, you just find an easter egg, like the Turkey Puncher Minigame that was in Doom 3 and that was satisfying as well.
Love the glory kill to get health mechanic. It adds to the shear desperation when you know the next hit will kill you, but if you can just get a glory kill you will be safe for a few more seconds.
beautifully written and researched. could feel the love for doom. so glad I came across your channel Kim keep up the great work bulletstorm was an absolutely awesome game that only now is getting the appreciation it deserves.
Doom II. Still the best game ever created in my opinion. I still play it regularly. The new Doom is fine, sure, although I personally was slightly disappointed. But oldschool Doom is the pinnacle.
Great vid as usual. Doom is my favourite game of all time. It's just fun to play! It's also actually rather special to me, I know it's weird for such a violent, emotionless and relatively simple game to carry emotional significance but this one does. My fondest gaming memories as a youth are my dad & I's religious Doom obsession. Not only was it just fun to play an awesome game with my father, I kind of needed it emotionally. I was a young teen and had confessed to my family that I was a lesbian and my mother and sister reacted _extremely_ negatively, and dad didn't seem thrilled too even if he reacted better. But it devastated me as I was incredibly close to my mother and my sister (Tho my sis did change her mind a few months later) and I felt so alone and practically disowned. But Doom came out a few weeks later and my dad, who shared my love of computing and who had introduced me to Commander Keen and Wolf 3D (Two other cornerstones in my gaming youth), swooped in and used Doom as a chance to start building bridges with me again and proving to me that I still had support and love from him at the very least. I will never forget our first, ferocious death match - and how against all odds, I managed to kick his ass by just one hard fought frag despite the fact I had the slower computer and a frame rate of like, 12. Great times.
Doom ended the Amiga, I know we had Wolfenstein but not many people knew about it outside of the PC gaming world. The people I knew sold their Amigas and brought PC's just so they could play doom. A friend of mine worked at a major retailer here in the UK and he remembers getting asked every single day by parents "will this PC run doom?". Doom was more than just a good game, it was a phenomenon. Our school installed it on the PC's in the computer room and would let the students play it in LAN mode during break times, it spawned a computer club in the end. All the kids used to talk about doom and of course more importantly PC vs Amiga.
Your school *let* you play it in breaks?? Holy grud, what is this school? Some kind of secret nirvana? Do all the teachers look like Lauren Southern?? 8---) In most places the game caused such chaos that it was often banned.
Only problem was that Desktop PCs were so bloody expensive.. I remember thinking 400 quid was for my Amiga was pricey. I paid a blinkin grand for my Pentium@120mhz. Doom was a fantastic game. Played it first on my PlayStation. I remember playing a demo I got from a magazine over and over 😀. First 3D first person game with free movement I ever played. Great channel BTW. All the best now.
New Doom 1&2 are amazing. I had the same reservations as KJ, but after trying Doom out it all became clear. I call New Doom - an exercise. It demands a lot of concentration and very quick thinking, making every large fight a challenge, that you overcome heavy breathing and smiling. Just like KJ described in his video. Great FPS/brawler.
Hey Kim you didn't mention Doom 64 which is a completely different game from Doom and DOOM 2. It wasn't a port. It was it's own game. I just like to know did you ever play it ? Your thoughts on it ? Alot of DOOM players loved it but thought it was quite a dark game.
I loved it :) My friends and I used to bring my PS1, His PS1 and Nintendo 64 to one of our houses and we'd play either CO-op or death-match over the PS1s and then single player on the N64. The soundtracks on both systems were just incredible. Far better than the original soundtracks. Doom ported over to both those systems REALLY well. They'll never be the PC version of course, but they're still awesome in their own right :) Loved the N64 versions of the monsters too. Ghastly looking things !
Long before I became the PC elitist that I am today, I actually managed to complete DooM on the SNES. It was quite a challenge indeed. Great video Kim, as usual ;)!!
As far as the bad box art, and I can only say this for the PS4 version, it's one of those where you can remove the slip, flip it, and you have a much, much cooler cover/back to the game. Great alternate cover design. As always, great video!
Lots of folks were disappointed when Doom 3 was launched to find that it lacked a coop mode. Part of what made Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom so engaging was the coop mode of play. If you had an Intel DX2/66, with 4 or 8 MB of RAM, an ATi Mach64 based video card, and a Creative SB16 card with a Roland Sound Canvas daughter card dangled off of it in 1993/94 ... then you were in business.
Yup, it was coop mayhem that brought down networks worldwide when Doom first launched, because of its use of broadcast packets. :D That was quickly fixed, but it was fun to know just how widely it was being played. Got me in the papers: www.gamers.org/dhs/dmpblcty/
Doom on the Amiga was always a mythical dream for me, and I never got to play it on the Amiga until a few months ago - so its been a long time in the waiting. I narrated a review of Amiga Doom yesterday, for release in a couple of weeks, so very much looking forward watching this Doom anthology video tonight. :)
Bloody brilliant Kim! This vid made so much sense to me - really made me excited to play the new Doom (just have to build me a bloody PC for the 1st time in 2 decades!) - Thanks!
Kim, I was in the same situation and I live in the US. Commodore was already gone by 1995 and I was still using my Amiga 1000, a platform that pretty much always had an obscure following in North America. Most of my Amiga games were cracked PAL versions copied from other Amiga owners my brother and I would meet at Commodore Club meetings. Genuinely, I was jealous that the UK got so many great titles we didn't. Generally, even when I was younger, I didn't care too much about cutting edge graphics, I cared whether the game was fun or not. My first chance to actually try Doom was the SNES port and while it did look bad in hindsight, I felt it was less noticeable on a CRT television. Unresponsive controls? I had no context to know what it's responsive controls would be like so I thought it was fine. Eventually I started going back to collect SEGA products I didn't have at the time so I picked up Doom for 32X at some point. That version... is just funny. The sound guy gave zero fucks, the music just sounds like boot stomps and farts. And it crashes to a DOS prompt after you beat it which I'm still not sure if that was an glitchy oversight or an intentional joke.
I had an Amiga at the time (and a few years on still). Running with an Blizzard 060@50 at it's heart it was for sure the best doom machine around my friends at the time. That is because using (AFAIR) ADoom featuring transparent map rotation together with the use of my Honeybee CD32 Pro Controller made it the perfect party version of this game. And it was faster than any 486 or Pentium PCs in my neighbourhood at the time by far. Of course mouselook did work too, but at the time noone was interested in playing such a game in this way, and having strafing assigned to the shoulder buttons was perfectly playable just like in the psx version later around at the same time (but of course it didn't feature the formerly mentioned map display). You could even AMIGA-M (equaling to ALT-TAB on Win system nowadays) to Workbench (Windows = Desktop) and start Eagleplayer or some Metallica, Nine Inch Nails (Naturally very suiting for Quake too;) or Prodigy CDDA as background music, replacing the (IMHO) poor original Doom Midi Tunes. Try this on the typical DOS6.22 / Win3.11 systems that where around mostly these days (Ok Win95 was around - but who got the money?). Or in short: The Amiga version of Doom I + II were by far the best, though it was sadly never officially and commercially released over here in Germany. You could of course order the PC version through some UK dealers featuring an Amiga patch though.
The technical reason the Amiga never got a good port of doom early on is because it was really bad at manipulating individual pixels, something PCs were much better at doing. The Amiga used planar graphics, where each pixel is broken up into different parts in memory. There were price advantages to it at the time, and it made 2D scrolling graphics easier, but it means you have to write to multiple locations to draw one pixel, making it much slower. The PC had what are called packed or chunky pixels, where every pixel is stored in 1 place, and much faster CPUs.
Thanks for the great video Kim. I'm grinning like a freak because I've yet to play the new Doom. Anticipating playing on my new GTX 1070 rig very soon. So glad it's as good as everybody has been saying it is.
Doom 3 is totally worth it, Kim! In fact, it's amazing how it is so different from Doom (2016), and yet both play tribute to the originals so well! Doom 3 is much more of an atmospheric horror game (probably one of the darkest games I've ever played!), and it's awesome :D
Great video, I experienced mostly the same, from the SNES version to the last one. I also played the third and it's expansion in ps3 and also enjoyed even if it's different.
Who could have thought a game called Doom could inspire such a heartfelt and beautiful video? This is what happens when the best video maker of 2016 talks about the best video game of 2016.
Rise of the Triad remake played really well but was broken technically. Really sad because when I wasn't restarting the damn thing and it wasn't glitching out, it was excellent fun.
At least you had a SNES! I had to borrow my friend's and rent the game (played a hell of a lot of Starwing too). My first Doom experience was on another friend's dad's "PC from hell" he had for architectural CAD work, so the SNES version felt cumbersome as hell, but I didn't care, it was DOOM!
Doom on the snes was completely fine. Back in the day when the only machine I had was a snes it was a completely serviceable port which I poured hours upon hours into. Doom is without a doubt my favourite video game of all time, nothing can come close and the snes port is a big reason for this.
Love the new DOOM, even though it doesn't quite live up to its potential. Its primary weakness is the strong focus on arena battles; while I don't mind it being pretty much a first-person Ninja Gaiden with guns, the dungeon crawl structure of the originals is sorely missing at the end. That aside, it's simply a bloody good time.
Thanks for your excellent insight into past day doom and present day doom. I recognize Doom's importance to video games and video game culture but its simply a game that I'm not interested in and I couldn't get interested in. I played the first doom on pc shortly after its release and much like the original wolfenstein - It just never gravitated towards me as gamer and I've just never been that type of gamer to enjoy first person shooter's. I'm not going to be an idiot and say the game is bad because the game is not bad, it deserves every amount of praise it gets. I'm just happy with the new version of doom, it was game that I never heard one bad thing about - all of my friends have enjoyed it and just goes to show you that with the right amount of work and dedication you can re-invent a beloved franchise that can appeal to old fans of doom and even new players to the franchise as well. Thanks for your excellent insight.
The Amiga really suffered not getting a port of Doom, it might have helped keep it going for a couple more years commercially in Europe at least. It was proven within weeks of the source being released that a cheap 030 accelerator was enough to run it at playable frame rates and if users knew games like that were coming it would have fueled an upgrading revolution the same way it did for the PC. I can see the reasons id software were not interested but one of the Euro publishers should have found a way to get it ported over.
Sad to say, but the death of the Amiga was good for computing as a whole. Standardization on x86 was good for industry and made the insane level of technological progress over the 90's possible. The 68000 series was already essentially dead vs x86 by the time the Amiga really picked up any steam with the A500 anyways, and the supposed future platform, PowerPC, was also a dead man walking. As much as the fanboy's hate to admit, despite the fantastic games library, the Amiga was doomed from the start.
"you can play doom on just about anything these days" that isba true quote. people literally film themselves playing it on shit like calculators and printer screens. next thing you know people will be able to play doom on their fucking fridge
Love when there's a long vid posted and I can look forward to coming home and watching the balls off it later. I already have a bad word about Doom on SNES though, the sodding price of it!
Excellent video as always :) Would be curious to know what you thought of Doom Eternal. Controversial game, but I loved it. Overall, I'm not sure if I prefer 2016 or DE
Nah, Doom 64 was a version of Doom developed exclusively for the Nintendo 64. It's much darker in tone, and the soundtrack a lot moodier and much more ambient in style. It's pretty much Doom remade from the ground up. Most levels are different, but there are some throwback levels. It's a legit game tbh. You can get Doom 64 wads that support ZDoom these days.
New Doom is great, but I didn't get that feeling you described. For me, the modern baggage, like upgrades and all the challenge stuff just kept getting in the way. I had fun, but I still have more fun with Brutal Doom.
I don't recall hearing anything negative leading up to the release of the newer Doom. The trailer looked cool, and then it hit and went big from there.
Rethought is putting it mildly. I based my dissertation on it. :D www.gamers.org/dhs/diss/ which certainly led to some fun times: www.gamers.org/dhs/dmpblcty/ www.gamers.org/dhs/usavisit/ www.gamers.org/dhs/misc/ianandi-en.html
"Stick n move, rip 'n' tear, it's the only way" The new Doom is truly magical - and I've played Doom since my old IBMPS2. Its the production and engine quality that made this game. Plus the (weakish) but involving plot. 8/10 for me :)
About 5 mins in, and yeah I had the same experience with the 32X version. I knew it wasn't as good as the PC version, but it's the one that I had and I played the crap out of it until I got a PC also around 97 or 98.
This is a good video but at an early point in it I felt the need to get back to my Doom 2 game. It really has held up incredibly well- I think Doom 1 and 2 just have this masterful design, both in the basic engine (something that's very fast and fun to play) and the levels for the most part. Sadly don't have anything which will run the new one. Sure I'll get to it eventually.
It was a blast to see my younger friends sucking at this game, too much old school to handle for them :D I really love this game, it's Game of the Year 2016 for me. The only MAJOR downside is the lack of true mod support, Doom has a legacy damnit! F this SnapMap bullshit....
I think the irony of Doom on the Snes is the very thing that made it possible at all also implies you could do a modern port for the snes that's about 1000 times better if you really wanted to. Or, you know, Quake, or any number of other absolutely ludicrous things you could come up with. That's the weird thing about a piece of hardware that put such a huge emphasis on sticking expansion hardware into a cartridge. I means that while it might be seriously questionable on some level, it's not at all out of line with it's core design philosophy to shove, say, a low-powered ARM core into it. Like the kind of thing that powers a raspberry pi. You're still not going to make miracles happen unless you really start cheating, because you're still limited by the graphics chip in the system, and specifically the implications of having to fit within the DMA limits of the system. (though if you worked strictly with a PAL system, and stuck to trying to code it for 30 fps... You could get close to the standard snes resolution I suppose...) Yeah, that aspect of the snes is really quite weird. For the record, Doom on the snes ran using the SuperFX 2 chip. Which means, in effect all the heavy lifting is being done by a RISC-like vector processor that ran as fast as 21 mhz. In some ways that's well into fast 386 or slow 486 level clock speeds... So it's not exactly a weak system in that sense. I wonder how much of the poor performance is lack of optimisation (the SNES doom port was pretty much a rush job done by one person at ID software in the space of a few months. Plus, Doom is mostly C code, and what few compilers existed for the snes were notoriously bad.) You never can tell. Certainly the snes, even with the superFX is not powerful enough to make porting something like doom easy to do with any decent level of performance... The Irony is that kind of raycasting engine might have worked about 10 times faster if you changed the orientation of the world 90 degrees and align your graphics with the scanlines... Obviously that would not have been an option for any kind of port though.... You'd have to design an entirely new kind of game to make anyone accept that kind of concept...
I had the same reaction with DOOM 2016. I had no hype for it at all. I was ready to just ignore it. Then the reviews started pouring in and I had to see what all the fuss was about. It's the best game I've played in years.
doom and warcraft 2 is what brought me over to the pc from Nintendo, I never could understand the technical aspects of systems back then and in my mind if my snes could run street fighter 2 turbo, donkey kong country with the crisp beautiful 2d graphics they had why was doom such a big deal, the graphics in doom for me I thought inferior and ugly, but it was a strange time that transistion from 2d to 3d and very confusing time for me also.
Been enjoying a few of these vids recently but I really gotta correct you on Bulletstorm being reviewed 'very badly' (also it's an interesting game to talk about on its own too). The critical reception at the time was generally very positive, 'meh' at the very worst and outstanding at it's best, but it was criminally overlooked, selling just short of the 1 million copies it needed to be a qualified success (which makes its failure all the more tragic). It was seen in a negative light however in the form of the 'Violent Videogames are Evil' argument that crops up every now and then and was one of the referred to subjects of this scrutiny.
24000 games on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Hard for an American that doesn't have nostalgic background to start any attachments. A to Z Spectrum Series similarly to your licensed games. Don't have to be continuous.
It's like the 2011 The Thing reboot, nostalgia brought to the modern day done quite well but doesn't really capture that initial excitement back in the day. I give the new Doom around an 8.5/10.
Great video, I loved the original DOOM games, but still unsure on the new one. It looks like a lot of repetitive running and gunning, people keep saying it plays a lot better than it looks but I'm gonna wait until it's a lot cheaper, especially if the multiplayer isn't too good
I didn't care much for FPS in the early days as the bad frame rate would give me motion sickness.. I'm giving them another chance now that they've improved.. I still prefer third person though.. Your shows are second to none nonetheless..
Something like this makes me wish the Amiga was successful in the US. It was more capable than the MS DOS. Even compare DOS and Amiga games. It would be great if id Software and Apogee develop games for it. Both DOS and Amiga owners can enjoy both games.
Oh yeah, if your first PC arrived at the arse end of the 90's, like mine did, did you ever play Total Anniahlation? It is to the RTS what Doom is to the FPS, dumping the "rock paper scissors" unit balance for "anything can beat anything else, with tactics, numbers and luck" instead.
A brilliant watch as always...I actually thought Duke Forever did well commercially dispite being utter crud,don't see how they fucked up the basic mechanics so much. I think you should do maybe the Castlevania series.
While i loved the new Doom and agree on most of what you say about, i don't really agree about hell, which i found a bit disapointing: They could say it was some barren planet other than Mars with a few caves and demonic artefacts strewn about and it wouldn't really make a difference. Same goes for the parts of Mars twisted by hell: I expected more than a few candles, skulls and sacrificed corpses. In both cases, i expected more twisty, non-euclidean geometry, some of it made of living flesh. But apart from that: Yep, it also was on my GOTY-list.
Best Doom is Brutal Doom :) I used to spend weeks making full on levels in Doom Builder. WEEKS on a single map. I love it so much. Brutal Doom with the Playstation 1 soundtrack = my favourite gaming experience bar none.
Oh man, I love that spooky Playstation soundtrack. Such creepy ambiance. I had Doom 64 first (didn't get the PSX till later), and I would play it all night, with headphones on. I loved it!
I feel like you jumped over Serious Sam, for the longest time the closest to old schooters, and Borderlands. Given, Serious Sam is more First Person Bullet Hell than the original Doom and was more about Satire and fighting hundreds of enemies at once but still Feel wise it felt pretty close to Doom. Same with Borderlands, which, despite it's Loot and RPG base (Which Shadow Warrior 2 also sports) the basic gun play feels very Doom. Still great video as usual.
So good at telling a story. So defined and granular. So emotional and precise. Excellent use of history and context.
Thank you
This video (particularly the “clincher” moment you site in “new Doom”) is a great example of why I love your work so much. Brilliantly written, entertaining, accurate, insightful and (most importantly) full of heart and genuine enthusiasm for the medium.
Basically, for what it’s worth, I think you are one of the best content creators working today. Long may you continue. I’ll be happy to contribute to your patreon.
Amazing work on this video. Despite there being a million retrospectives on Doom you managed to create one that feels fresh. I am a new subscriber and will definitely be binging on your past videos!
Kim! I've watched your videos a LOT in the last week or so. Utterly brilliant channel, bringing back so many memories. I'm 39 and a lot of your videos from the 90s strike a cord with me. LOVE the channel. Subscribed. Please keep up the good work.
*Great review,* and thanks for the trip down memory lane. 👍
The original Doom was *absolutely fucking brilliant,* and I played it far, far too much back in my University days.
There was this point where I started to have "Doom dreams" ... which scared the hell out of me. Not because the dreams were scary, they were always just dreams about kicking monster arse, but because it represented an addiction that had gotten out of control. I had never been so obsessed by any game before, so I decided that it had to stop _immediately._
I really needed to pass exams, so I examined my priorities, went Doom cold - turkey, and never really got back in the saddle after my exams were over. Not even Doom 2 could rekindle the fire after that.
But back when I was playing Doom all the time, I really fucking _loved_ it!
You forgot about the two aspects of the game that was present in the classics that made this one great. The non-linear maze like level design and the exploration aspects. Secret hunting is so satisfying in this game, because it's always something cool, like a bit of lore, an upgrade, a missable rune trial, or, best of all, a classic level. Sometimes, you just find an easter egg, like the Turkey Puncher Minigame that was in Doom 3 and that was satisfying as well.
I also would like to see you take on the Serious Sam series.
a fantastically impassioned review, fusing together old and new. you've got 2017 off to a flyer kim, thanks for the great videos!
Love the glory kill to get health mechanic. It adds to the shear desperation when you know the next hit will kill you, but if you can just get a glory kill you will be safe for a few more seconds.
beautifully written and researched. could feel the love for doom. so glad I came across your channel Kim
keep up the great work
bulletstorm was an absolutely awesome game that only now is getting the appreciation it deserves.
My first experience with Doom was also Snes Doom. I was a kid and it was amazing! Subbed, keep making this high quality content.
Bulletstorm is one of the best games i ever played and the humour was amazing, i was in stitches at some of the conversations and comments.
Doom II. Still the best game ever created in my opinion. I still play it regularly. The new Doom is fine, sure, although I personally was slightly disappointed. But oldschool Doom is the pinnacle.
I played the new doom and thought it was better than the oldschool doom. They did a really good job with it.
Great vid as usual. Doom is my favourite game of all time. It's just fun to play! It's also actually rather special to me, I know it's weird for such a violent, emotionless and relatively simple game to carry emotional significance but this one does. My fondest gaming memories as a youth are my dad & I's religious Doom obsession. Not only was it just fun to play an awesome game with my father, I kind of needed it emotionally. I was a young teen and had confessed to my family that I was a lesbian and my mother and sister reacted _extremely_ negatively, and dad didn't seem thrilled too even if he reacted better. But it devastated me as I was incredibly close to my mother and my sister (Tho my sis did change her mind a few months later) and I felt so alone and practically disowned. But Doom came out a few weeks later and my dad, who shared my love of computing and who had introduced me to Commander Keen and Wolf 3D (Two other cornerstones in my gaming youth), swooped in and used Doom as a chance to start building bridges with me again and proving to me that I still had support and love from him at the very least. I will never forget our first, ferocious death match - and how against all odds, I managed to kick his ass by just one hard fought frag despite the fact I had the slower computer and a frame rate of like, 12. Great times.
I can remember seeing Doom running in a Computer shop in the early 90's.
Can honestly say it was the first game that the graphics took my breath away.
Doom ended the Amiga, I know we had Wolfenstein but not many people knew about it outside of the PC gaming world. The people I knew sold their Amigas and brought PC's just so they could play doom. A friend of mine worked at a major retailer here in the UK and he remembers getting asked every single day by parents "will this PC run doom?". Doom was more than just a good game, it was a phenomenon. Our school installed it on the PC's in the computer room and would let the students play it in LAN mode during break times, it spawned a computer club in the end. All the kids used to talk about doom and of course more importantly PC vs Amiga.
Your school *let* you play it in breaks?? Holy grud, what is this school? Some kind of secret nirvana? Do all the teachers look like Lauren Southern?? 8---) In most places the game caused such chaos that it was often banned.
Only problem was that Desktop PCs were so bloody expensive.. I remember thinking 400 quid was for my Amiga was pricey. I paid a blinkin grand for my Pentium@120mhz. Doom was a fantastic game. Played it first on my PlayStation. I remember playing a demo I got from a magazine over and over 😀. First 3D first person game with free movement I ever played. Great channel BTW. All the best now.
New Doom 1&2 are amazing. I had the same reservations as KJ, but after trying Doom out it all became clear. I call New Doom - an exercise. It demands a lot of concentration and very quick thinking, making every large fight a challenge, that you overcome heavy breathing and smiling. Just like KJ described in his video.
Great FPS/brawler.
outstanding video! up there with Ahoy and Nostalgia Nerd's output. you have a great balance of info and personal. thanks for the entertainment! :)
The front cover issue of DOOM (2016) was addressed with the inclusion of a reversible cover which had a similar style to the originals.
Hey Kim you didn't mention Doom 64 which is a completely different game from Doom and DOOM 2. It wasn't a port. It was it's own game. I just like to know did you ever play it ? Your thoughts on it ? Alot of DOOM players loved it but thought it was quite a dark game.
I loved it :) My friends and I used to bring my PS1, His PS1 and Nintendo 64 to one of our houses and we'd play either CO-op or death-match over the PS1s and then single player on the N64. The soundtracks on both systems were just incredible. Far better than the original soundtracks. Doom ported over to both those systems REALLY well. They'll never be the PC version of course, but they're still awesome in their own right :) Loved the N64 versions of the monsters too. Ghastly looking things !
The N64 version wasn't a port. It was it's own game. Midway created an entirely new game for Nintendo's hardware. Exclusive to the system.
I'm planning on playing the Brutal Doom 64 mod they released recently. www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom-64
Kim Justice + Doom? I'm going to put some drink, close the lights, deactivate the phone and try to savor every single second from that video.
Darkness 2 also had the 'get close to an enemy for an execution that recovers your health' too btw.
Long before I became the PC elitist that I am today, I actually managed to complete DooM on the SNES. It was quite a challenge indeed. Great video Kim, as usual ;)!!
As far as the bad box art, and I can only say this for the PS4 version, it's one of those where you can remove the slip, flip it, and you have a much, much cooler cover/back to the game. Great alternate cover design. As always, great video!
Lots of folks were disappointed when Doom 3 was launched to find that it lacked a coop mode. Part of what made Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom so engaging was the coop mode of play. If you had an Intel DX2/66, with 4 or 8 MB of RAM, an ATi Mach64 based video card, and a Creative SB16 card with a Roland Sound Canvas daughter card dangled off of it in 1993/94 ... then you were in business.
Yup, it was coop mayhem that brought down networks worldwide when Doom first launched, because of its use of broadcast packets. :D That was quickly fixed, but it was fun to know just how widely it was being played. Got me in the papers:
www.gamers.org/dhs/dmpblcty/
Doom on the Amiga was always a mythical dream for me, and I never got to play it on the Amiga until a few months ago - so its been a long time in the waiting. I narrated a review of Amiga Doom yesterday, for release in a couple of weeks, so very much looking forward watching this Doom anthology video tonight. :)
Fantastic review, Kim! Really appreciate how you put it into your personal historical perspective.
Just to correct you Kim, Return to Castle Woflenstein is the first of the new series followed by Woflenstein, the new order, and the old blood
Awesome, Kim! Thanks for this ;) One of my favorite titles played last year!
great video as always, love your work 'jazz jackrabit' on the cover, classic.. ^_^
Always excellent Kim. Best videos on youtube.
Bloody brilliant Kim! This vid made so much sense to me - really made me excited to play the new Doom (just have to build me a bloody PC for the 1st time in 2 decades!) - Thanks!
Kim, I was in the same situation and I live in the US. Commodore was already gone by 1995 and I was still using my Amiga 1000, a platform that pretty much always had an obscure following in North America. Most of my Amiga games were cracked PAL versions copied from other Amiga owners my brother and I would meet at Commodore Club meetings. Genuinely, I was jealous that the UK got so many great titles we didn't.
Generally, even when I was younger, I didn't care too much about cutting edge graphics, I cared whether the game was fun or not. My first chance to actually try Doom was the SNES port and while it did look bad in hindsight, I felt it was less noticeable on a CRT television. Unresponsive controls? I had no context to know what it's responsive controls would be like so I thought it was fine.
Eventually I started going back to collect SEGA products I didn't have at the time so I picked up Doom for 32X at some point. That version... is just funny. The sound guy gave zero fucks, the music just sounds like boot stomps and farts. And it crashes to a DOS prompt after you beat it which I'm still not sure if that was an glitchy oversight or an intentional joke.
I had an Amiga at the time (and a few years on still). Running with an Blizzard 060@50 at it's heart it was for sure the best doom machine around my friends at the time. That is because using (AFAIR) ADoom featuring transparent map rotation together with the use of my Honeybee CD32 Pro Controller made it the perfect party version of this game. And it was faster than any 486 or Pentium PCs in my neighbourhood at the time by far. Of course mouselook did work too, but at the time noone was interested in playing such a game in this way, and having strafing assigned to the shoulder buttons was perfectly playable just like in the psx version later around at the same time (but of course it didn't feature the formerly mentioned map display). You could even AMIGA-M (equaling to ALT-TAB on Win system nowadays) to Workbench (Windows = Desktop) and start Eagleplayer or some Metallica, Nine Inch Nails (Naturally very suiting for Quake too;) or Prodigy CDDA as background music, replacing the (IMHO) poor original Doom Midi Tunes. Try this on the typical DOS6.22 / Win3.11 systems that where around mostly these days (Ok Win95 was around - but who got the money?).
Or in short: The Amiga version of Doom I + II were by far the best, though it was sadly never officially and commercially released over here in Germany. You could of course order the PC version through some UK dealers featuring an Amiga patch though.
loved the video, so much I booted up Doom 2 again. glad I can now support you on patreon.
Excellent review Kim!
Yeah, I got one other shooter: Alien Soldier for the Genesis. You use the melee attack in that game to convert most bullets into health pellets.
Wonderful video and insightful recollections. First ever PC game (along with Sim City 2000) I ever played. I should get the new one now!
Well written, thoroughly researched and interesting.
It is even better when played with the weapon in the middle like old Doom ☺
The technical reason the Amiga never got a good port of doom early on is because it was really bad at manipulating individual pixels, something PCs were much better at doing. The Amiga used planar graphics, where each pixel is broken up into different parts in memory. There were price advantages to it at the time, and it made 2D scrolling graphics easier, but it means you have to write to multiple locations to draw one pixel, making it much slower. The PC had what are called packed or chunky pixels, where every pixel is stored in 1 place, and much faster CPUs.
Thanks for the great video Kim. I'm grinning like a freak because I've yet to play the new Doom. Anticipating playing on my new GTX 1070 rig very soon. So glad it's as good as everybody has been saying it is.
Doom 3 is totally worth it, Kim! In fact, it's amazing how it is so different from Doom (2016), and yet both play tribute to the originals so well! Doom 3 is much more of an atmospheric horror game (probably one of the darkest games I've ever played!), and it's awesome :D
Really good insight, I agree on the SNES port. It was pretty much my nostalgia for Doom. Great video.
Glory Kills. This system was also used in THC's Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine to restore health
Great video, I experienced mostly the same, from the SNES version to the last one. I also played the third and it's expansion in ps3 and also enjoyed even if it's different.
Who could have thought a game called Doom could inspire such a heartfelt and beautiful video? This is what happens when the best video maker of 2016 talks about the best video game of 2016.
Rise of the Triad remake played really well but was broken technically. Really sad because when I wasn't restarting the damn thing and it wasn't glitching out, it was excellent fun.
Awesome a new Kim vid. Tis a good day.
bloody brilliant review m8
At least you had a SNES! I had to borrow my friend's and rent the game (played a hell of a lot of Starwing too). My first Doom experience was on another friend's dad's "PC from hell" he had for architectural CAD work, so the SNES version felt cumbersome as hell, but I didn't care, it was DOOM!
Doom on the snes was completely fine. Back in the day when the only machine I had was a snes it was a completely serviceable port which I poured hours upon hours into. Doom is without a doubt my favourite video game of all time, nothing can come close and the snes port is a big reason for this.
Love the new DOOM, even though it doesn't quite live up to its potential. Its primary weakness is the strong focus on arena battles; while I don't mind it being pretty much a first-person Ninja Gaiden with guns, the dungeon crawl structure of the originals is sorely missing at the end. That aside, it's simply a bloody good time.
Thanks for your excellent insight into past day doom and present day doom. I recognize Doom's importance to video games and video game culture but its simply a game that I'm not interested in and I couldn't get interested in. I played the first doom on pc shortly after its release and much like the original wolfenstein - It just never gravitated towards me as gamer and I've just never been that type of gamer to enjoy first person shooter's. I'm not going to be an idiot and say the game is bad because the game is not bad, it deserves every amount of praise it gets. I'm just happy with the new version of doom, it was game that I never heard one bad thing about - all of my friends have enjoyed it and just goes to show you that with the right amount of work and dedication you can re-invent a beloved franchise that can appeal to old fans of doom and even new players to the franchise as well. Thanks for your excellent insight.
The Amiga really suffered not getting a port of Doom, it might have helped keep it going for a couple more years commercially in Europe at least. It was proven within weeks of the source being released that a cheap 030 accelerator was enough to run it at playable frame rates and if users knew games like that were coming it would have fueled an upgrading revolution the same way it did for the PC. I can see the reasons id software were not interested but one of the Euro publishers should have found a way to get it ported over.
Sad to say, but the death of the Amiga was good for computing as a whole. Standardization on x86 was good for industry and made the insane level of technological progress over the 90's possible. The 68000 series was already essentially dead vs x86 by the time the Amiga really picked up any steam with the A500 anyways, and the supposed future platform, PowerPC, was also a dead man walking. As much as the fanboy's hate to admit, despite the fantastic games library, the Amiga was doomed from the start.
Great review again Kim. How do you do it? I think it's about time for the "I have no mouth and I must scream" review you promised many moons ago
I remember reviewers really liking Bulletstorm, I even got a hold of it day one after reading some.
Would be nice to watch you do a playthrough of a modern WAD such as 'Sunlust' on your stream!
"you can play doom on just about anything these days" that isba true quote. people literally film themselves playing it on shit like calculators and printer screens. next thing you know people will be able to play doom on their fucking fridge
It's true. I can play it on my old 2gb iPod.
nobel 11 one day we will be able to play doom on our fucking dicks
I would love to see it run on a 84MHz ARM Cortex M3 with a 80x50 matrix of WS2812B LED's
edit:BTW, 100K RAM
Haha. Jazz Jackrabbit BFG edition.
Love when there's a long vid posted and I can look forward to coming home and watching the balls off it later.
I already have a bad word about Doom on SNES though, the sodding price of it!
Excellent video as always :)
Would be curious to know what you thought of Doom Eternal. Controversial game, but I loved it. Overall, I'm not sure if I prefer 2016 or DE
The true sequel to Doom 2 is Doom 64. Have you not played it? It's God tier, you'd love it!
It was a tad dark at times, but a lot better than I'd expected, and it was great to have an entirely new game as opposed to a port.
MichaelLeroi I isint it called doom 3 I dont get it
Nah, Doom 64 was a version of Doom developed exclusively for the Nintendo 64. It's much darker in tone, and the soundtrack a lot moodier and much more ambient in style. It's pretty much Doom remade from the ground up. Most levels are different, but there are some throwback levels. It's a legit game tbh.
You can get Doom 64 wads that support ZDoom these days.
Doom 2 remake confirmed, says Poop.
New Doom is great, but I didn't get that feeling you described. For me, the modern baggage, like upgrades and all the challenge stuff just kept getting in the way. I had fun, but I still have more fun with Brutal Doom.
I don't recall hearing anything negative leading up to the release of the newer Doom. The trailer looked cool, and then it hit and went big from there.
Anyone who networked doom in 1992-1993 knows gaming changed that year for ever ... and rethought their degrees.
Rethought is putting it mildly. I based my dissertation on it. :D
www.gamers.org/dhs/diss/
which certainly led to some fun times:
www.gamers.org/dhs/dmpblcty/
www.gamers.org/dhs/usavisit/
www.gamers.org/dhs/misc/ianandi-en.html
😆I was studying Computer Systems Engineering at University back then - and the arrival of Doom meant that I was ticking all my boxes!👍
"Stick n move, rip 'n' tear, it's the only way"
The new Doom is truly magical - and I've played Doom since my old IBMPS2.
Its the production and engine quality that made this game.
Plus the (weakish) but involving plot.
8/10 for me :)
Amazing video like usual
About 5 mins in, and yeah I had the same experience with the 32X version. I knew it wasn't as good as the PC version, but it's the one that I had and I played the crap out of it until I got a PC also around 97 or 98.
I experienced Doom first on SNES. I liked it well enough
This is a good video but at an early point in it I felt the need to get back to my Doom 2 game. It really has held up incredibly well- I think Doom 1 and 2 just have this masterful design, both in the basic engine (something that's very fast and fun to play) and the levels for the most part.
Sadly don't have anything which will run the new one. Sure I'll get to it eventually.
It was a blast to see my younger friends sucking at this game, too much old school to handle for them :D
I really love this game, it's Game of the Year 2016 for me. The only MAJOR downside is the lack of true mod support, Doom has a legacy damnit! F this SnapMap bullshit....
I think the irony of Doom on the Snes is the very thing that made it possible at all also implies you could do a modern port for the snes that's about 1000 times better if you really wanted to.
Or, you know, Quake, or any number of other absolutely ludicrous things you could come up with.
That's the weird thing about a piece of hardware that put such a huge emphasis on sticking expansion hardware into a cartridge.
I means that while it might be seriously questionable on some level, it's not at all out of line with it's core design philosophy to shove, say, a low-powered ARM core into it.
Like the kind of thing that powers a raspberry pi.
You're still not going to make miracles happen unless you really start cheating, because you're still limited by the graphics chip in the system, and specifically the implications of having to fit within the DMA limits of the system.
(though if you worked strictly with a PAL system, and stuck to trying to code it for 30 fps... You could get close to the standard snes resolution I suppose...)
Yeah, that aspect of the snes is really quite weird.
For the record, Doom on the snes ran using the SuperFX 2 chip.
Which means, in effect all the heavy lifting is being done by a RISC-like vector processor that ran as fast as 21 mhz.
In some ways that's well into fast 386 or slow 486 level clock speeds...
So it's not exactly a weak system in that sense.
I wonder how much of the poor performance is lack of optimisation (the SNES doom port was pretty much a rush job done by one person at ID software in the space of a few months. Plus, Doom is mostly C code, and what few compilers existed for the snes were notoriously bad.)
You never can tell. Certainly the snes, even with the superFX is not powerful enough to make porting something like doom easy to do with any decent level of performance...
The Irony is that kind of raycasting engine might have worked about 10 times faster if you changed the orientation of the world 90 degrees and align your graphics with the scanlines...
Obviously that would not have been an option for any kind of port though....
You'd have to design an entirely new kind of game to make anyone accept that kind of concept...
I had the same reaction with DOOM 2016. I had no hype for it at all. I was ready to just ignore it. Then the reviews started pouring in and I had to see what all the fuss was about. It's the best game I've played in years.
great video as all ways kim
doom and warcraft 2 is what brought me over to the pc from Nintendo, I never could understand the technical aspects of systems back then and in my mind if my snes could run street fighter 2 turbo, donkey kong country with the crisp beautiful 2d graphics they had why was doom such a big deal, the graphics in doom for me I thought inferior and ugly, but it was a strange time that transistion from 2d to 3d and very confusing time for me also.
the doom 4 concept is the division in 2011.
I think Doom 3 was awesome, and enjoyed it a ton..., I also think it was a first step to a new era for the Doom series...
Been enjoying a few of these vids recently but I really gotta correct you on Bulletstorm being reviewed 'very badly' (also it's an interesting game to talk about on its own too).
The critical reception at the time was generally very positive, 'meh' at the very worst and outstanding at it's best, but it was criminally overlooked, selling just short of the 1 million copies it needed to be a qualified success (which makes its failure all the more tragic).
It was seen in a negative light however in the form of the 'Violent Videogames are Evil' argument that crops up every now and then and was one of the referred to subjects of this scrutiny.
24000 games on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Hard for an American that doesn't have nostalgic background to start any attachments. A to Z Spectrum Series similarly to your licensed games. Don't have to be continuous.
Great writing Kim..
Wolfensteen?????????? FFS pronounce it STEIN!
More like V_O_LFENSHTYNE
raafmaat Pronouncenazi much?
I just assumed it was a deliberate taking of the piss.
StoicVampire Pig
yeah the W is not really a V, in german the W sounds just a bit more like V, but not a full V ;)
I´m sure when I was a kid the game used to be called Wolfenstain
Whats the tune playing at the nine minute mark?
I love this franchise so much 💕💕
Hahahaha I knew never to doubt the new Doom. I knew from day one it was going to be the only modern fps game for me.
It's like the 2011 The Thing reboot, nostalgia brought to the modern day done quite well but doesn't really capture that initial excitement back in the day. I give the new Doom around an 8.5/10.
Great video, I loved the original DOOM games, but still unsure on the new one. It looks like a lot of repetitive running and gunning, people keep saying it plays a lot better than it looks but I'm gonna wait until it's a lot cheaper, especially if the multiplayer isn't too good
Loved it ! What did you thought of DooM 64 though ?
now I kinda have to play the new Doom and Wolf games
I didn't care much for FPS in the early days as the bad frame rate would give me motion sickness.. I'm giving them another chance now that they've improved.. I still prefer third person though.. Your shows are second to none nonetheless..
Something like this makes me wish the Amiga was successful in the US. It was more capable than the MS DOS. Even compare DOS and Amiga games. It would be great if id Software and Apogee develop games for it. Both DOS and Amiga owners can enjoy both games.
Oh yeah, if your first PC arrived at the arse end of the 90's, like mine did, did you ever play Total Anniahlation? It is to the RTS what Doom is to the FPS, dumping the "rock paper scissors" unit balance for "anything can beat anything else, with tactics, numbers and luck" instead.
There's a hack for Doom on the 32x that turns it into a really good port with full screen graphics and quality FM music.
A brilliant watch as always...I actually thought Duke Forever did well commercially dispite being utter crud,don't see how they fucked up the basic mechanics so much.
I think you should do maybe the Castlevania series.
While i loved the new Doom and agree on most of what you say about, i don't really agree about hell, which i found a bit disapointing: They could say it was some barren planet other than Mars with a few caves and demonic artefacts strewn about and it wouldn't really make a difference. Same goes for the parts of Mars twisted by hell: I expected more than a few candles, skulls and sacrificed corpses. In both cases, i expected more twisty, non-euclidean geometry, some of it made of living flesh.
But apart from that: Yep, it also was on my GOTY-list.
I can't believe I used to jump while playing SNES Doom! Hehe, it looks like ARSE! :D
Best Doom is Brutal Doom :) I used to spend weeks making full on levels in Doom Builder. WEEKS on a single map. I love it so much. Brutal Doom with the Playstation 1 soundtrack = my favourite gaming experience bar none.
Project Brutality is even better.
Oh man, I love that spooky Playstation soundtrack. Such creepy ambiance. I had Doom 64 first (didn't get the PSX till later), and I would play it all night, with headphones on. I loved it!
Great video! :)
I feel like you jumped over Serious Sam, for the longest time the closest to old schooters, and Borderlands. Given, Serious Sam is more First Person Bullet Hell than the original Doom and was more about Satire and fighting hundreds of enemies at once but still Feel wise it felt pretty close to Doom. Same with Borderlands, which, despite it's Loot and RPG base (Which Shadow Warrior 2 also sports) the basic gun play feels very Doom.
Still great video as usual.
I'd always choose Doom over any modern "immersive" game. I'm a proud oldschool warrior and I don't need no bloody cover :D