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2 years ago
This is Doom. You know this. The rhythms have been burnt into your DNA by this point: Gun, demons, maze, exit. Now add a ticking time limit forcing careful target prioritisation and precise movement and a level full of floating tokens which require collection (most of them, at least) before the exit will reveal itself. This is Skulldash: Expanded Edition, a massive mod re-released for the GZDoom engine…
3 years ago
The thrills of gibbing demons and sitting still watching numbers go up combine in Idle Doom, a mod turning id Software's seminal face-paced FPS into an idle game where you watch a machine kill monsters so you can upgrade to a bigger monster-killing machine. It is exactly what it sounds like: a Doom idle game. It's just the ticket for people who want to feel…
Would you like a $3,000 copy of Doom 2? Sure, that’s a little bit more expensive than the £5.99/$4.99 Steam version, but you’d be getting five whole floppy disks! When the world ends, that plastic might be valuable. Still not convinced? Well then, I guess John Romero will have to sell his copy to someone else.
I adore mods which give new life to mundane objects. Every crate in the crate-filled warehouse of CrateDM is potentially a player waiting to frag you. Prop Hunt modes put us in the mindset of level designers placing rocks and buckets. In Run For It!, a new mod for old Doom, objects which didn't have legs do now have legs. Ammo packs, lamps, trees, barrels,…
Ben Mansell has never released a Doom level before, but his first effort took 300 hours to build, spread across an entire year. Originating as a doodle back in 2003, Foursite is an enormous structure, divided into four parts, each with its own theme and boss battle. Mansell reckons it took a friend three hours to complete on their first attempt and required some tinkering…
4 years ago
Back in 2010, a chap named Paul Schneider brought Doom II fans an exciting mod in the form of Unloved [official site]. A traipse through the classic shooter several shades darker (way more than fifty shades) than fans were used to, it was an exercise in serving up entrails as floors and chunks of flesh scattered throughout each level. Most importantly, it was good. It…
After two decades, Doom still has a vibrant modding community. Now game designer JP LeBreton has opted to draft his autobiography, Autobiographical Architecture [official site], as a Doom II mod, deeming the game a perfect medium for the multi-volume telling of his life. Doom has been a huge influence on LeBreton. He started out making his own Doom levels in his bedroom, later finding a…
Do you remember a time when Wolfenstein hero B.J. Blazkowicz was a grinning, bum-chinned sprite with shiny blue twinklers rather than a morose sad-eyed man in a broken world? I've enjoyed several versions of Wolfenstein over the years, and perhaps none more so than The New Order, but I'm still fond of the first 3d title in the series. And I fucking love Doom. What…
Of all the genres I would choose if someone held a gun to my head and forced me to make a Seinfeld video game, I can't say a first person shooter would be high on my list. But hey, that didn't stop Doug Keener from trying that very thing using Doom II, and dammit he has done a fine job.
I realise the new hotness in demonic dismemberment is Doom Notfour but this weekend I popped back to Doom II to check out a new(ish) player-made level. One of you lovely readers recommended dead.wire by 'Xaser' to Adam because our lad's into spooky stuff, then he shared it with me because I like fraggy stuff. Sure enough, dead.wire is both spooky and fraggy, travelling inside…
Brutal Doom [official site] isn't your grandfather's Doom II, is the sort of thing I'd say if I wrote for a games magazine in the '90s. Its reworked weapons, enemies, and combat do change Doom an awful lot, making it an ultraviolent new game with a friendly old look. Now Brutal Doom has its very own story campaign, blasting through a Mars base, down to…
Ask me "Alice! You like Doom and player-made stuff and player-made Doom stuff - what's this year's best?" and I'll sheepishly reply "Ah, heck, I don't play nearly enough to know. The selfie mod was funny, wasn't it? With the selfie stick? Right? Jokes? Oh, hey, did you see the Doom Mixtape? Look I need to..." Don't ask me that. Some people who do play…
Many things can be improved by boshing them into Doom, and that goes for games criticism too. Liz Ryerson, a musician, Doom enthusiast, and the developer of Problem Attic, has written some of my favourite games criticism of recent times, and in March started recording the Doom Mixtape. It's a video series where she plays through favourite and curious player-made Doom levels, picking over what…
5 years ago
Brutal Doom [official site] may be the best evidence yet that our entire world is inside the mind of a child in 1995 in bed hallucinating gore, fatalities, mutilation, gore, guns, gore, and swear words, their Global Hypercolor t-shirt turning a lurid shade of turquoise around the neck and armpits to indicate a terrible fever. Creator Sergeant Mark IV this weekend released version 20 of…
I've been trying to change my use of 'awesome' from the '90s exclamation of bodaciousness to the more reverent and terrified connotations it once had. But no, the mod Brutal Doom [Mod DB page] is totally awesome, not to mention tubular, radical, excellent, gnarly, wikkid, sikk, righteous, and wikkid sikk. It's the gory fever dreams of a child of '90s excess after a hard day's…
I think of the ultra-bloody mod Brutal Doom as how Doom is to the imagination of an ten-year-old, with all the guts and the gore and the ripping and the tearing. Ian MacLarty's Doomdream [official site] is a very different imagined take on Doom. Doomdream's a curious free little game that MacLarty calls "An impression of my dreams after I've been playing Doom all day."…
I feel a bit guilty for mostly posting Doom mods that are a bit wacky when so many fab mods and levels are still coming out. Well. Here, I'll tell you to play the excellent Demonsteele and then I'll feel less guilty posting about a Doom mod which adds a selfie stick and Instagram colour filters. The first version of InstaDoom launched over the weekend,…
Do you remember that impressive Half-Life 2 mod where a chap replaced all the sounds with new versions he'd made himself with his mouth, lips, tongue, saliva, and perhaps other parts of his gastrointestinal tract? What a silly sausage! Now someone has done the same for Doom. Shotguns, rockets, growls, elevators: you name it, they've recreated it with their mouth. What could be more Doom-y…
John Romero celebrated Doom's 21st birthday last week by sharing a load of neat-o unseen art and photographs from his personal archive, but in my gushing I missed a big Doom birthday tradition. For 11 years now, the Doomworld community have marked the day with the Cacowards, a celebration of the Doom mapping and modding community's best from the past year. They're still going strong!…
"HAPPY 21ST BIRTHDAY, DOOM!" John Romero tweeted yesterday. "In honor of this legal drinking age birthday, I'm about to release some never-before-seen DOOM game art!" I know what you're thinking - "21 years old! The US drinking age is barbaric." Then you pause and realise "Wait, never-before-seen Doom art? Ooh!" And yes, it is splendid. Since then, the id co-founder has shared treasures including scans…
