Cool, I'm glad you capitalized DOOM. It's fun to type it out as DooM too. I recently decided that Doom is probably my third favorite game of all time, or maybe has potential to sweep in under Super Metroid and Link to the Past. Gasp! Can't believe I'm saying that. But when I say Doom, I incorporate Doom 2, Final, and all the endless fan made megawads out there, so maybe that's cheating. But the megawad community has been going consistently strong since 1993... so by this point, a lot of them outclass the vanilla games in many ways and have surpassed them. The architecture and level design can be truly breathtaking with some fan maps. The well runs deep and I keep finding myself going back to Doom over the decades and always get to dive into new content I haven't played before. The formula is perfect and there seems to be an endless barrage of maps... pure pipe dream. It's utterly timeless.
TSTR wrote:Also fuck chaingunners.
You'd LOVE Plutonia.
Ziggy587 wrote:Aside from checking out a few of the Master Levels, I've yet to dig into any mods. I've seen a bunch of stuff on YouTube that looks pretty neat. But I think the huge number of mods in existence makes it kinda taunting to dive into. The Way Id Did sounds pretty interesting though, I'll have to check that one out. I'll have to check out Complex Doom on YouTube, but I'm not sure if that would be something I'd like or not.
Speaking of mods... How do you feel about source ports? What I mean is, engines that allow you to significantly alter gameplay, graphics, etc. I've seen a ton of YouTube videos with the higher resolutions textures / sprites and upgraded lighting / visuals, but I'm not sure how I feel about it. I used Doomsday back in the XP days, but I never used any mods. I was only using Doomsday because The Doom Collector's Edition didn't have mouse support on XP. Lately I've just been playing the games in DOSbox.
It's worth separating mods and megawads. I could easily point you into the direction of better megwads to check out instead of The Way Id Did, for sure. It can be daunting, but the good news is the top tier ones are almost universal among the fanbase across the board. The only problem you might run into is the difficulty or "slaughter wads" where they're just ridiculously tough and too much. But I tend to skip over those.
Megawad = generally means ~32 maps like a full new episode.
What I have played:
Alien Vendetta - top favorite (also the name might be misleading, but it's all vanilla Doom textures/monsters... masterful level design)
Valiant - #2! Changes pistol and chaingun, some new enemies that feel authentic
Ancient Aliens - Weird new textures and neon lights that might be annoying, but it was very good
Vanguard - shorter and older ~12 map set by the guy who did Valiant and Ancient Aliens, not bad
Memento Mori 1-2 - these are older ones I can highly recommend
Hell Revealed 1-2 - extremely hard, I can't remember them much
Community Chest Pack 1-3 - as they sound, I think every single map is a different author so the quality can vary a lot, but it can be cool to go through a megawad with such an array of diversity and the homeruns can be awesome
Community Chest Pack 4 sounds extremely good and like a new gold standard. I might check that one out next.
Here's where you can get everything:
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/I fully endorse sourceports! But yeah, I only enjoy the control options, higher resolutions, and framerate. I never play Doom with vertical mouse look, jumping, etc and like to keep it fairly vanilla, which is why I mentioned Brutal Doom never interested me much. Though I'm digging Complex Doom. I've replayed the official Doom's a lot through all the official ports, like Doom 3 BFG edition, both the XBLA and PSN collection releases, etc haha.
I was a big supporter of ZDoom over the years, but I'm using the latest version of GZDoom now. If you own Doom 2 on Steam, you can install it to that /base/ directory, then rename gzdoom.exe to dosbox.exe so you'll load that up instead... and Steam will keep track of your time. Now that I'm doing this it will probably rack up the most hours for me haha.
https://gzdoom.drdteam.org/index.phpgzdoom even supports gamepads flawlessly. But I'm 10x better with Doom on a mouse/keyboard. I got all the achievements/trophies for the XBLA/PSN releases though and those controller controls are kind of clunky, haha.
I haven't gotten too fancy with anything else, launchers, or whatever. I just throw in a single line in the config file to play whatever megawad I'm playing at the time. Let me know if you need any help on this.
This guy has a lot of non-commentary playlists and plays vanilla gzdoom, here's a nice Valiant map to check that out and how it all looks, basically how my setup is too, so as you can see, the changes aren't too dramatic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxVCD9yQBkMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeYJ5wymTusAncient Aliens!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvXQ11nhjms--------------------------
Doom 64 is extremely good and nobody should overlook this one! It's also extremely easy to play on PC today, very much like with Doom sourceports, you can play it with better controls, resolutions, and framerates than the original N64 cart. Years ago there was the "Absolution" conversion, but I highly recommend the newer EX port.
https://doom64ex.wordpress.com/What impresses me about Doom 64 is how it's pretty damn hard on the higher levels. It's no pushover at all. Hell Knight's are practically the common Imp in the second half. It's definitely up there with Plutonia and one of the toughest official Doom installments. A shame it hasn't gotten official re-releases like the originals.