I like to think myself a discerning games player. I explore the far reaches of video games in search of fascinating systems, profound experiences, and deep truths. Also, I cannot stop beaming at Doom II imps dressed up as pirates whose hats drift lazily down to the ground after you blow them away with a flintlock. That’s Pirate Doom, a mod giving everything a piratical makeover with twenty-odd new levels, pirate hats, rum, beer, beards, peg legs, cannons, and ripped Monkey Island music.
It’s very pretty and cartoony, with silly pirates and lush Monkey Island-y skies, but is a pretty solid pack as well as a bit of a giggle. Though I haven’t finished it, the maps seem pleasant, and the replacement weapons strike a nice balance between familiar and new. The shotgun becomes a sawn-off and the rocket launcher is a cannon, for example, but they’re not direct analogues and have alt-fire modes like a cutlass slash or barrage of cannonballs.
It does lift music from Monkey Island and sprites from LucasArts’ wild west FPS Outlaws but I don’t know what you’d expect from pirates.
Pirate Doom is this-a-way. You’ll need the GZDoom engine and either a full copy of Doom II or the Freedoom replacement pack for textures and sounds and whatnot. A new version came out earlier this month, adding another map and the sort of change I’m always delighted to find in patch notes:
Added peg legs to Chaingunners
Here’s a look at the map added in the latest version, in that merry Monkey Island ‘voodoo’ style:
16/06/2014 at 12:16 Jigowatt says:
ARRRRchvile.
16/06/2014 at 12:19 TheTourist314 says:
Oh my god this is the greatest thing I’ve seen all year. Though I’m having a bit of a tough time getting it to load through DoomRunner. I have GZDoom and everything with the right Doom2 WADs and so forth. Hmm.
17/06/2014 at 05:52 EveryoneLovesPirates says:
I just dragged-and-dropped the .wad right onto the gzdoom executable and it loaded without any problems.
16/06/2014 at 12:53 yhalothar says:
Haha, love the voodoo archvilles and how you can blow the hats off of imps.
16/06/2014 at 13:19 Lex says:
Hm … the whole Video my thought were “How does ripping some sprites from other games gets you an article in RPS?”
16/06/2014 at 13:38 Plopsworth says:
At least the pepperbox revolver, gatling, dynamite stick and double barreled sawed-off are directly loaned from Lucasarts’ Outlaws.
16/06/2014 at 15:47 Michael Fogg says:
A side effect of this article is that it gave me a strange urge to reinstall and play Outlaws. The memories. “Where are you, marshall?” etc.
16/06/2014 at 13:47 JamesTheNumberless says:
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think the only criteria for a thing being written about on RPS is that someone at RPS wants to write about the thing.
16/06/2014 at 13:55 Lex says:
No need to correct you as you are not wrong. There are some people that are happy to read about this mod for sure. I’m just not one of them as I don’t think this mod does anything special in comparison to other Doom mods.
16/06/2014 at 14:43 JamesTheNumberless says:
I still think the Aliens mod was the pinnacle of Doom modding, what I always wanted to see more of in Doom was tight level design, something that Doom itself seems to abandon part way through the vanilla game. I can’t see much of that in evidence in the video, it’s more of the predictable cavernous rooms filled with every monster type they could fit in.
About RPS, lots of things I wouldn’t have written about get written up in the spur of the moment but that’s something I like about this site, it hasn’t lost touch with the fact that it’s a blog and not a games review magazine, and therefore doesn’t have to answer your initial question.
Having said that, there is a sense in which because they are extremely popular, they are influential whether they like it or not. They do have to have a certain level of responsibility when it comes to who they promote.
I already knew about this mod from several industry people’s Twitter accounts. The real story is probably not that this exists, but that it’s recently popular.
16/06/2014 at 16:34 Lex says:
For me it would be the Mega Man 8-bit mod but there are a lot more that are interesting in their own way.
As for RPS and their coverage, I come here to see a different take on gaming news. And it delivers most of the time. Sure, it’s a blog and they are people and people have opinions that sometimes differ from my own but thats how life works.
Also, there is no real answere to my question in the first post.
16/06/2014 at 14:58 jezcentral says:
Thank god. I thought I was having a Monday morning grump when my immediate reaction was “Hey this would be cool. 20 years ago.”, so I went back to looking for coffee rather than post such a negative-nancy thing.
However, now that the subject has been broached….
N.B. Of course, I fully support RPS’s right to post whatever they like, and I suspect Alice has a greater appreciation of whimsy than I do, because I’m Mr Grumpy-pants.
16/06/2014 at 15:24 Alice O'Connor says:
I’ve heard it said that video games are all about guns, but this may be the first time I’ve found someone unable to even see anything in a game beyond its gun sprites.
16/06/2014 at 16:16 Lex says:
I don’t think my mentioning of ripped sprites also means that I’m unable to see anything else. (like the ripped dynamite sprites that are clearly not guns ;)
16/06/2014 at 14:45 RaveTurned says:
Good to see Ian Cacodemon is still getting work. :)
16/06/2014 at 15:42 Turkey says:
My name is Guybrush Threepwood. Prepare to have your huge guts ripped out!
17/06/2014 at 02:35 The Random One says:
Obligatory: If only you could parlay with the monsters.
16/06/2014 at 16:41 Mr-Link says:
You got it all wrong guys and gals. This is simply what the Doom guy THINKS his pirate adventure looks like, as he is obviously consuming an unholy amount of alcohol.
That might explain the Monkey Island music.
16/06/2014 at 16:44 jezcentral says:
Now it all makes sense. This is Doom Guy’s
PyrolandPirateland.EDIT: For context: link to youtube.com
17/06/2014 at 02:35 The Random One says:
Somehow, it feels more like Blood than Doom.