What difficulty are you on, Doom CAPTCHA? I want to know because I need to know how bad to feel about myself. Six times I’ve tried to pass your FPS test by killing three monsters to prove I’m human. Six times I’ve failed. For thousands of years, people have asked what it means to be human. It turns out it was never a philosophical issue after all. It was, I’m gutted to report, a skill issue all along.
]]>Last week, Bethesda released a remastered edition of Doom and Doom II on Steam, with lots of extra episodes and improvements. One of these new features is a built-in browser for mods, and support for many existing mods that previously required a different version of the game. Basically, lots of good fan-made mods are now playable on the Steam version of ye olde Doom. That's neat! Ah, but there is some demon excrement on the health pack, so to speak. The mod browser lacks moderation and lets people upload the work of others with their own name pinned as the author. That's prompted one level designer to call it "a massive breach of trust and violation of norms the Doom community has done its best to hold to for those 30 years."
]]>Your most commonly visible bones are your teeth, so what better way to worship at the fleshy altar of Doom than by polishing those bones with an electric toothbrush whose little LCD screen is running Id Software's seminal satanic shooter? The latest delightfully weird device rising to the eternal question "Can it run Doom?" is a WiFi-enabled 'smart toothbrush', which is juuust powerful enough to run a version of Doom. You can even control it with your mouse. Here, check this out.
]]>When dramatic parents panicked over the satanic influence of Doom in the 90s, maybe they had a point. Doom has burned through people's souls and minds, filling them with a desire to play Id Software's seminal shooter on every device they can. The question "Can it run Doom?" has driven these demonic vassals to make it playable on everything from tractors to teletext. These hellbound hearts are even daring to corrupt the totemic device of American liberty: the lawnmower. Come April, you will be able to play Doom on the Husqvarna Nera line of robotic automowers. Is nothing sacred?
]]>Is there any greater scientific endeavour than the unending quest to get Doom to run on everything? From teletext to pregnancy tests to tractors to literal rat brains in a jar, every time you think that we’ve exhausted the possibilities, someone finds a new way to play the seminal 30-year-old shooter on something new.
]]>Before Doom became the lean, mean murdermachine we know and love, Id Software had far bigger plans for their seminal satanic FPS. Ideas dropped during development include a big focus on story, four playable characters, elemental shields, demonic weapons, and more. The mod Doom Delta brings to life many such ideas from sources including an old design document and leaked alpha builds, which I think makes it fanfic? A new version of Doom Delta launched last week, offering a curious vision of the many Dooms Id didn't make.
]]>To celebrate Doom's 30th birthday we had a discussion about the (understandably) vaunted FPS's influence, and what games would look like without it. It seems particularly interesting today in light of the recent resurgence of Doom-style shooters, often known as "boomer shooters" because of their deliberately retro style and singular focus on shootin' stuff and bein' cool, much like Doom. And then the obvious solution was to just ask the devs making these games about what they think of Doom and its impact on their work.
I reached out to developers who've worked on Turbo Overkill, Prodeus, Forgive Me Father (and Forgive Me Father 2) and almost the whole stable working at New Blood Interactive to ask them some annoyingly specific questions about Doom in the hope of getting the sort of idiosyncratic answers you get from interesting devs - and they delivered! In fact, they delivered in such quantity and quality that I've elected to just present their answers to you, rather than try to weave them together as if we were all sitting together at dinner exchanging bon mots, both for clarity and to include as much as possible in their own words. It's a fascinating and entertaining collection of thoughts.
]]>There are as many Doom mods as there are stars in the sky: jillions of accursed celestial bodies orbiting the supermassive black hole that is id Software, each infested with its own local flavours of cacodemons and keycards and shotguns. I've played just a handful - certainly, far from enough to pronounce myself any kind of expert - but I do feel like I've played one of the best in the shape of Siren, a Doom II total conversion from Dithered Output, the first episode of which can be downloaded free from Itch.io.
The mod's overall vibe is encapsulated, I think, by the sentient vending machine you meet a short way in, just round the corner from a rec room that contains a disembodied head on tentacles, and down the corridor from a tiered canteen full of ghouls and unsympathetic men with shotguns. You ask the machine if it has any clue what's going on. It tells you that its job is to keep its mouth shut and dispense soda. Can I have a soda, then? "No."
]]>The first mod I ever downloaded was for Skyrim. It replaced NPCs with Shrek. The second was a texture pack for Dark Souls: Remastered. I believe that these two examples form a representative sample of what mods are: quality of life improvements, and Shrek. Doom’s modding community, known by its file package WAD, is the Ur modding community. Thanks to John Carmack’s lightning-fast engine, creating levels and content for Doom has been accessible for 30 years. WAD devs have gone on to become fully-fledged game designers, and some WADs have been released commercially. The breadth and depth of this community formed the bedrock of game developers. And yet even with this pedigree, MyHouse.WAD is a miracle.
]]>Video game openings have always been a source of fascination for me. As a player, you're excited by the prospect of the game to come - the sights you'll see, the challenges you'll face - and first impressions can make or break your entire perception of what a game is versus the one you had stored in your head before switching it on. For video game creators, however, a new beginning is often racked with questions. What, exactly, do you choose to show players first? How will you introduce them to something they've never seen before? And if that game is successful, how do you keep reinventing that first impression across what could be several decades?
In revisiting every mainline Doom game to celebrate its 30th anniversary this month, it's clear that even id's iconic shooter has wrestled with how to answer these question, and the ways it's tried to reinvent itself over the years paints a captivating portrait of a series trying to move with the times. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening levels. Played in close succession, crushing 30 years into not even quite three hours, what emerges isn't just the evolution of one of the all-time great PC games, but also a potted history of the FPS. So join me as we chart Doom's rise, fall and rebirth through the lens of its first stages.
]]>Confession time, readers. Before a couple of weeks ago, I had never played the original Doom. As a child, my family didn't have much money and I didn't get my first laptop until I was 16. Thus, I missed out on a lot of what are now considered PC staples. With dread, I'm often met with the accursed exclamation, "You've not played insert game before?" followed by a good dose of judgment. But what do you do when you need to play through a backlog of games all while keeping up-to-date with new releases for work? With games now stretching out at 100+ hours apiece, where is the time for old classics like Doom?
For me, approaching Doom was cathartic. Playing a game that's older than myself was certainly an experience, but I was shocked at how well it holds up.
]]>Last time, you decided that ricochet attacks are better than blue shadows on dodges and dashes. I expected this outcome but am still glad to see a good quarter of you favoured cool essence over cool effort. We continue. This week, in honour of Doom's 30th birthday (we've already written about John Romero's memories, motion sickness, and inviting monsters to a birthday party, with more to come), I ask perhaps an impossible question. How could anyone ask you to pick between two iconic tools of ultraviolence. What kind of monster would. Yet we must. What's better: Doom's shotgun or Doom 2's super shotgun?
]]>"Consider yourself warned! This book contains scenes of graphic violence!" These are the words that adorn the Doom comic book, which was originally released for promotional purposes during 1996's E3 by GT Interactive and Marvel Comics. "Knee-deep in the dead!" is the next bit of text below the logo, referencing the name of the first shareware Doom episode and beautifully describing the blood-soaked cover illustration by Tom Grindberg, who was apparently tickled enough at the thought of drawing this monstrosity to take time away from working on 2000 AD.
The cover is an accurate peek at the gore and demonic entrails that lie within this epic work of sequential storytelling, which required the writing skills of not one, but two gentlemen - Steve "Body Bag" Behling and Michael "Splatter" Stewart. Both Behling and Stewart have a decent body of work between them at Marvel, where they've penned more civilised fare starring the likes of Ant-Man and The Hulk. The Doom comic, in comparison, seems to have been a thing that was written in a fever dream, and DoomWorld, which lovingly hosts scans of this brisk read to this day, describes it appropriately: "Some time in 1996 a couple of guys got together and smoked what was apparently a large amount of crack and then injected pure heroin into their eyes and then proceeded to create what is now known only as 'the Doom comic.'"
]]>The party poppers are out, the finger food is ready and waiting to be served, and the guest list for Doom's 30th birthday party is well and truly set. Well, it would be if Doomguy ever lowered the drawbridge to his flying space castle high above the Earth's orbit. I did try and get a radio signal out earlier, but the grumpy sod never responded. Probably too busy organising his trophy case in his man cave, to be honest. But let's face it. Doomguy wouldn't be much fun at a birthday party anyway. He'd be too busy ripping and tearing into his presents to give anyone the time of day, let alone a polite thank you, and then he'd be working on ripping and tearing apart said presents in a display of strength and machismo.
So Doom's hellspawn have got together to throw their own party for the occasion, and let me tell you, they're having a riotous good time all by themselves. Well, most of them are, anyway, as there are some demons here that wouldn't know how to have fun even if was seared across their skulls with the beam of a BFG9000. Here's every classic Doom enemy ranked on a scale of the most miserable wallflowers to the life and (undead) soul of the party.
]]>Doom co-creator John Romero has marked the seminal FPS’ 30th anniversary by releasing his second unofficial campaign for the hell-shooter. Sigil 2 follows on from Romero’s previous expansion for the Doom engine - released in 2019 for its quarter-century celebrations - by adding nine new levels that you can go and grab for free right now.
]]>Doom turns 30 this year, and that's a cause for celebration. There are many reasons to commemorate id Software's 1993 jaunt through the demon-infested corridors of Mars, from the fact that you can play it on every device known to man to its undying modding scene that even lets you pet Cacodemons. But I have a personal connection with Doom that's a bit special. It's the first game that made me so sick I wanted to puke.
]]>“When people read anything, no matter the source, they will believe it.” So says Doom designer John Romero on the subject of his relationship with John Carmack. Together, the pair built id Software and the FPS genre as we know it - before the cracks started to show during the difficult development of Quake, ending their professional partnership.
Yet any lasting acrimony has now dissipated. That became apparent when Romero’s new autobiography, ‘Doom Guy: Life In First Person’, showed up on shelves with a glowing back cover quote from Carmack. The latter praised Romero’s “remarkable memory”, and waxed wistfully about their shared impact on the gaming medium. “For years, I thought that I had been born too late and missed out on participating in the heroic eras of computing,” Carmack wrote. “Only much later did I realise that Romero and I were at the nexus of a new era - the 3D game hackers.”
]]>The conversation/free-for-all around the role of automated "AI"-based game development rolls on with a few thoughts from Tom Hall, co-founder of id Software and one of the creators of the original DOOM, who says he's (Commander) keen on the prospect of "ethical" uses for such tools in gamedev, but worries that reliance on them "will homogenize games, sort of like AAA games are now".
]]>Teletext. Notepad. Twitter. A tractor. A pregnancy test. There have been few limits to the weird and wonderful ways that enterprising Doom fans have found to play the seminal FPS over the last 30 years, but this latest one might take the crown for both weirdest and wonderful-est. Someone is teaching a bunch of lab-grown rat neurons to play Doom. Yes, their literal conscious existence is Doom. I told you it was weird.
]]>Add another one to the list of weird and delightful ways to play ye olde Doom: teletext. A new mod converts Doom to a teletext signal, letting you play the seminal shooter rendered in blocky teletext art on a telly. You can even control it with your TV remote. Have a look in the video below! I really, really like the smiley face replacing Doomguy's gurn.
]]>Defining boomer shooter Doom, like Skyrim, is one of those games that’ll eventually be ported to everything. Microwaves. Checkouts. Voight-Kampff machines maybe, in the years to come. Right dang today though, you can (almost) play Doom in Notepad, or DOOMpad as its creator Samperson calls it. Catch a glimpse of the ripping and tearing in action by watching the video below.
]]>I often grumble about remasters and 'HD texture packs' making classic games look worse than the original (heck, I don't even play Quake with newfangled texture filtering). And yet, I am delighted by a new Doom mod which replaces all the sprites for enemies and items with new 3D forms. The secret is voxels, carefully recreating those old 2D sprites in 3D pixels. It's pretty great, in a 'makes the game actually look the way I had remembered it' sort of way.
]]>The greatest legacy left by humanity for alien archaeologists to find in the aeons to come will be millions of random devices running id Software’s pioneering FPS Doom. The latest such piece of kit is the display from a John Deere tractor, jailbroken and fragging away at demons at this past weekend’s DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas. The tractor computer was hacked by Sick Codes, who’s trying to draw attention to farming equipment manufacturers who lock down their products to prevent owners from repairing them.
]]>Indie cat adventure Stray has been doing well for itself since it was released last week. Now, it seems other games want to get in on that cute factor. Cue Stray In Doom, which sends Doomguy off for a rest to let a sweet little kitty frag some demons in his stead. Creator Edy Pagaza tweeted footage from the mod earlier this week, and you can now try it for yourself by downloading it from ModDB. You can watch a trailer below. Aww!
]]>I'm a huge fan of watching the AI fight each other, whether that's spawning demons in Dwarf Fortress's Arena mode or carting around a suicidally incompetent security guard in Half-Life. Enter CacoFrendo, a mod for the original Doom that lets you pet the Cacodemon until he becomes your pal and fights on your side.
]]>Love Doom? Like Quake? Tolerate Daikatana? Well then, you’ll be chuffed to hear that Romero Games is hiring for a new first-person shooter project that has the involvement of legendary FPS maestro John Romero. The company says they’re now “100% focused” on the genre, and they’re making a game with a major publisher using Unreal Engine 5. That’ll make the shotgun blasts look extra kerblammerific.
]]>John Romero, legendary developer and co-creator of PC classics Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein, has announced he’s writing an autobiography entitled 'Doom Guy – Life In First-Person'. The book isn't due to be published until early next year, but does this mean the Doom movie from 2005 starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is technically Romero’s biopic? Did The Rock not want to wear a wig? I’m very confused.
]]>Doom – the 1993 one – can famously run on all manner of stuff that generally has no business running games, from inkjet printers to pregnancy tests. You’ll be wanting a bonafide PC for this new mod, though, as it adds some GPU-intensive but rather lovely ray tracing to Doom’s first three episodes. There’s DLSS support too!
]]>My personal top Twitter tip: add pleasant breaks to the nightmares of your feed by following a few good image accounts or bots which regularly post nice things. I like accounts which post rock formations or bots which generate landscapes. Perhaps you find comfort in violence? If so, you might enjoy interrupting your doomscrolling with the Doomscroll Doom Bot, a Twitter bot which is very slowly posting a complete playthrough of Ultimate Doom, one frame every hour.
]]>Doom is now playable on Twitter - sort of. Thanks to Tweet2Doom bot, you can send replies to the account with a list of actions - move, turn, shoot, etc. - and get a video clip of Doom showing the results sent back to you.
]]>Oldfangled is newfangled again and that goes double for this inevitable feat of hardware hackery. That's right, it's Doom. Of course it's Doom. More specifically, it's Doom running on one of Nintendo's old-but-new Game & Watch handheld toys that was created to run Super Mario Bros. Throw Mario in the bin though because after rip and tearing into this retro-styled device someone has taken it on a tour of hell instead.
]]>Microsoft are buying Bethesda, or rather their parent company ZeniMax Media. Like a nesting doll, Bethesda themselves are the parents of yet other game studios that Microsoft will also own. What of, say, Id Software? One of Id's co-founders John Carmack reckons that the Bethesda buyout is a good thing. He says that the new Microsoft ownership could allow him to "reengage" with his old work.
]]>Update: Microsoft say they'll "keep the commitment" to bring Bethesda's Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo to PS5 as timed exclusives. More below.
Microsoft just announced they've bought ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda. The developers of games such as Skyrim, Fallout, Dishonored, Prey, Doom, Quake and all those classics are now technically Xbox Game Studios. Xbox boss Phil Spencer made a post welcoming the developers, in what he calls a "landmark step" for both Microsoft and Bethesda.
What a year.
]]>Getting Doom up and running on weird and unexpected computers is a long-running jape, with Id Software's seminal shooter having been put on everything from digital cameras to a McDonald's cash register. Now technotinkerer Foone Turing has demonstrated playing Doom in a pregnancy test, which is the wildest I've seen so far. It is not a convenient way to play Doom (and you cannot use the tester for its intended function while playing Doom, obvs) but by god, there it is. May this feat drive people to find something even weirder to run Doom on.
]]>Doom Eternal still is a very, very good shooter, though there are some key differences between this one and the one that came out in 2016. If you're still getting to grips with the game, I've listed my top tips for shooting all the demons and some stuff on exploring levels.
]]>Early on in Doom Eternal, you'll pick up your first weapon mod. These are secondary fire effects and there are a maximum of two per weapon. You can swap them on the fly if you've unlocked both of them, so they can make a standard shotgun either throw sticky bombs or turn into a fully automatic shotgun. But there is a way to make them even better.
]]>The new Gears Of War spin-off, Gears Tactics came out yesterday, and already players are turning their soldiers into characters from other games. Tactics has you recruit various soldiers as you go on, you see, and while you can't change the general look of their bodies or faces, there are still a bunch of features you can alter to adjust them to your liking.
So, here's a few examples you could follow if you fancy having characters like Duke Nukem or Doom Guy in your squad.
]]>Blood, guts, and chainsaws are integral parts of Doom, but so are its bangin' metal soundtracks. Australian game sounds man Mick Gordon was the composer for both Doom (the 2016 one) and Doom Eternal's soundtracks, winning multiple awards for the former back when it released. The Doom Eternal OST launched over the weekend and apparently something sounded off to those with an ear for it. It turns out that Gordon didn't have as much a hand in the final mix as he would have liked.
]]>Doom Eternal is a big game with tons of secrets hidden throughout. Most are just the secret items hidden throughout all of the levels, which we will provide links to here. I should warn you that the rest of this article contains major spoilers.
]]>Doom Eternal may have seen delays but it is a very, very good shooter. There are some key differences between this new Doom game and the one that came out in 2016, so I've listed my top tips for playing the game and even how to kill some of the tougher enemies.
]]>I have some good news and some bad news regarding the seventh mission of Doom Eternal. The good news is that there are fewer collectables here compared to the previous mission. The bad news is that there are still 20 of them. Once you have them, the vast bulk of the collectables will be yours, so let's get into it.
]]>The sixth mission in Doom Eternal has the most collectables hidden within. On top of that, there are the usual secret encounters, lot of enemies to kill, and even some challenges to finish. This is going to be a long one, so strap yourself in and let's get started.
]]>With the fifth mission of Doom Eternal, the number of collectables has gone up rather significantly. It's very easy to miss them as well, since there may be multiple items in one secret location. But don't worry, I've found all of them and have put together this list of their locations.
]]>Now, I know what you're thinking. Why have I combined the collectables for the final level and the hub area of Doom Eternal? The fact of the matter is that the final level only has one collectable to be found, but the hub area also has a couple of secret items that are very well hidden.
]]>This is the final level in Doom Eternal where hunting for collectables is a major part of the game. While they're nowhere near as difficult to get to as some missions, these last few items are at least well hidden. We will uncover their locations, so you can complete your collection for most items.
]]>The first mission of Doom Eternal is more of a tutorial stage than anything else. It's here that you'll learn all about weapon mods, alternate firing modes, and how to kill some of the first few demons. While a lot of the items here are on the main path, there are a few that are hidden away.
]]>Entering Sentinel Prime in Doom Eternal is a rather ominous prospect. At the very least, hunting for collectables here is extremely simple. Most of the items found are Codex Entry pages, but there is one ghost knight with a Praetor Suit point that you may have a small problem finding.
]]>All along the fourth mission of Doom Eternal, you will see a Doom Hunter being constructed. A rather ominous prospect and with good reason, as at the end of the level is a boss fight. However, this is not the only thing you can find here as there are quite a few collectable items to seek.
]]>The second mission of Doom Eternal brings up the concept of Weapon Points. These are upgrades that you can use to spend on buffing up your weapon mods that you have unlocked. There are Weapon Points that you'll always unlock when going through a mission, but there are also secret encounters and the Slayer encounters that are optional. The second mission has a bunch of collectables as well, so it's worth having a look at our guide to see if you missed anything.
]]>Just before the third mission of Doom Eternal, you're introduced to Praetor Suit Points. These are coins held by ghostly knights who gently take the knee once you have received the coin. It's as if they know their place, unlike the demons that are defending the hell priest. New enemies here include Whiplash, a snake-like foe, and the grotesquely fat Mancubus.
]]>You're nearing the end of Doom Eternal now and there's also a bunch of collectable items you should look for on the way up. Not as many as before, but this mission does have a couple that are a little more well hidden.
]]>Plodding on through the second part of Nekravol in Doom Eternal, you'll be facing even more brutal assaults from the demons of hell. There are plenty of collectables to nab across this level, so this guide will tell you where to find them.
]]>Some missions in Doom Eternal have a large number of collectables, but Taras Nabad has some real stinkers that are really tricky to locate. They can be behind switches hidden quite far from where the actual collectable is. After what felt like hours, I've put together a list of where to find them.
]]>“Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. “But also my favourite level in Doom.” He was a smart man, and he probably lives in hell now, on account of all the atheism. But listen, hell doesn’t seem that bad. Bit hot. Bit demonic. You could do a lot worse than a trip to the underworld, is what I’m saying, and as luck would have it, we have the perfect means for you to go there without singeing your eyebrows or being dunked in a toxic lake for eternity. That’s right: videogames. It’s always videogames. Here are the 10 best hells you can visit on PC.
]]>It's not just your guns that can be upgraded in Doom Eternal. Praetor Suit points, runes, and Sentinel Crystals can all be used to buff up the Doomguy so that he's not just a mass of muscles under an ill-fitting space marine suit. Well, he still is, but now he can potentially last longer while swimming in radioactive ponds.
]]>The Doomguy. Stoic, silent, flickering eyes at the bottom of the screen. He's not really the talkative type, is he? Who would've guessed his first words weren't "death" or "murder" or "double-barrelled", but a Russian-language explanation of complex neural network modelling techniques? This week, developer Denis Malimonov unleashed his own sort of hell - replacing his regular human face with the Doom Slayer's low-fidelity visage with machine learning.
]]>Doom made is grand return in 2016 and it somehow catapulted id Software's classic to a new, even bloodier level. If you haven't delved into the reboot yet, then don't worry too much about multiplayer, maybe dabble with the level creation tools, but definitely play the campaign.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>There's only a few weeks left in 2019, and we're fast approaching this year's Cacowards, Doomworld's annual community awards, so it feels only right to see what's been going on in the classic Doom modding scene these past few months.
I'm beating the Cacowards to the punch, really, and giving you a handful of choice picks to get your teeth into early. We've got Doom 4 for DOS, eldritch weirdness, shareware era nostalgia, a crossover with Blood, and an all-you-can-eat buffet of around 2700 levels for the Doomer who can never have too much.
]]>So Doom Eternal has been put back a few months into an already busy March period. Not the best of things to have to report, but at the very least, those who will be getting the game via a pre-order are now getting a port of Doom 64 as an apology. Below is an updated version of everything you need to know about Doom Eternal.
]]>Google held another one of their Stadia Connect conferences today, and this one was meant to be all about what games you'll be playing in the "scary" cloud come November. Sure enough, there were new Stadia games aplenty announced this evening, with the biggest addition being Cyberpunk 2077.
To help keep track of them all, here's a list of every Google Stadia game confirmed so far, as well as which games are coming at launch, which ones will be arriving a little bit later, and which games you'll only be able to play by subscribing to one of the special Stadia publisher subscriptions.
]]>Tim Willits has been out of games for just under three weeks, having left his previous position of Doom-maker id’s director in July. In his new role, he’s the Chief Creative Officer of Saber Interactive, putting him in charge of five studios across the globe.
]]>It's never a good sign when Skyrim's back in the Charts. It means mischief is afoot. And not the good kind. In this case, it's Bethesda's Quakecon sale, meaning a whole bunch of the dreariest of usual suspects return to droop our eyelids and weary our souls. And Nier and Flibble Glibble Pants are both on sale yet again. In fact, this week's top 10 features precisely one game released in the last TWO YEARS.
So this week I think I shall describe to you the feelings I feel when I see these games appearing once more.
]]>Nearly a quarter-century after The Ultimate Doom added episode four -- Thy Flesh Consumed -- to the genre-defining FPS, original Id developer John Romero gives us a fifth for free; Sigil. Nine new levels for the original Doom, so no super shotguns or (thankfully) Revenants. It's pointedly old-school demon-slaughter, claustrophobic and dark, with a look that never strays too far from the original game. While free today with a MIDI soundtrack, a commercial version landed last weekend with guitar accompaniment by masked metal maven Buckethead. Below, my thoughts on it.
]]>Here is a riddle for you. When is Doom not Doom? Why, when its open-source code has gone through countless iterations and become a modern development platform in its own right!
Sometimes a Doom mod outgrows its old home and breaks away as a completely standalone game. This week I'm bringing you an all-you-can-eat buffet of free, full games (and some demos) that are the best to have flown Doom's nest. The list includes platformers, horror, racing, deathmatch and plenty of old-school FPS fun. Some of them have even settled down to raise their own mod scenes and their own spin-off games. Isn't that sweet?
]]>As chief Doom appreciator here on RPS, I feel it is my sad but solemn duty to inform you all that the new Doom movie Brock warned us about last year is still coming. This one is direct-to-video, coming from director Tony Giglio. Doom: Annihilation is due out this autumn, and for what it's worth, they do talk (briefly) about a portal to hell in the trailer, giving it a small advantage over the confused theme of the original film. Still, the trailer doesn't fill me with hope - goofy monster makeup, very plastic guns and odd coloured lighting give this one a distinctly cheap, bland look. Give it a peek for yourself below.
]]>Doom 2 is more than just Doom these days. Some modern levels for the 90s classic FPS feature thousands of enemies, fiendish traps and difficulty beyond anything Id Software dreamt of. Eviternity, released yesterday, runs the gamut. It's a 32-level campaign split up into six five-map episodes, each with a fresh look and some new monsters. You'll start out in gloomy gothic tunnels, plinking away at zombies with a pistol. By the end, you'll be screaming through the vast halls of heaven itself, cutting through ungodly-huge swarms of demons with BFG in hand. It's rather brill.
]]>The hot new way to create high-resolution texture pack to fancy up old games is 'deep learning', feeding the original textures into a computer so algorithms can draw more-detailed versions of what they imagine the images look like. It has... varied results. I'm a hoary purist who still plays Quake pixellated without texture filtering so I'm not mad keen on these hallucinated manglings, but I do like the technique as an act of creation rather than replication. Which leads me to coo over Everest Pipkin's Mushy, a new free tileset for isometric games generated by machine learning with the intention of creating a glitched-out look that's just not right.
]]>When I walked into Razer's HyperSense room at their CES booth, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Before me stood a desk and chair like any ordinary PC set up (albeit one solely comprised of Razer products) and two grinning demo guides. "Do you know Doom?" one of them said. Why, yes, I do, I like it a lot and know it well, I replied. "Sit down then," he said, "and put on these headphones." So I did. And let me tell you, readers, this what I played was not the Doom I remembered. This was HyperSense Doom, and you simply haven’t experienced the true majesty of emptying a Super Shotgun into the hoofing great face of a hell demon until you’ve fired it with the full force of Razer's new haptic feedback system.
]]>Doom turned 25 last month, so it can do whatever it wants over the holidays - that includes turning into a golf game or converting the hazy memories of robot vacuum cleaners into hellish arenas. While I was away from my news-desk, programmer Rich Whitehouse cobbled together DOOMBA, a system for exporting the memories of your house's layout from a Roomba and filling it with demons. An impressive bit of weird Doom one-upmanship over modder TerminusEst13, who just one day prior released Hellshots Golf - a multiplayer golf conversion set across eighteen holes of hellish relaxation. Give both a look below.
]]>It's Doom's 25th birthday, and Id's classic FPS has grown up along with me. While I've enjoyed modern iterations such as 2016's reboot, the original's ever-mutating open source foundation and lively mod scene just won't let me go. When John Romero announced he was releasing a nine-level Doom episode built to 1993 spec, I shrugged, because that pales in comparison to what the Doom community have built this year. Let's dig into the winners of the 2018 Cacowards, Doomworld's annual mod ceremony, including some standalone, freeware games - no Doom mod experience needed.
]]>Celebrating the 25th birthday of Doom's shareware episode today, Id Software co-founder and level design wizard John Romero has announced he's making a whole new episode for the seminal first-person shooter. Sigil is its name, and launching free in February 2019 is its game. Romero calls Sigil "the spiritual successor to the fourth episode of Doom," the one added in the Ultimate Doom expansion, saying it "picks up where the original left off." While Sigil will be free, it is getting paid physical releases too, with the fanciest including "a pewter statue of John Romero's head on a spike."
]]>We're just shy of Halloween here and the stars are aligning, allowing unholy powers to warp Doom into strange, near-unrecognisable forms through the powerfully dark act of modding. Out tonight is Total Chaos, a survival horror mod so grand in its ambition that it leaves almost nothing recognisable as 'Doom', with detailed 3D environments and modern horror style. More traditional but still impressive is an early demo of The Crimson Deed, a vampire-themed dungeon crawl. Check out trailers for both below, plus some Quake-related surprises from 3D Realms.
]]>October is Skeleton Appreciation Month, and few people appreciate skeletons quite as much as Doom modder Marphy Black. Through his mastery of Agitating Skeletons, he has posed deep philosophical problems, made us contemplate infinity and sometimes just punch a whole lot of skellingtons. His latest is the most fiendish by far - he's probably going to make some poor Twitch streamer hate Doom, because this is basically Desert Bus, but more evil. You probably shouldn't play Revenant Bus, but you're not going to listen to me, are you? Below, a warning in trailer form.
]]>VR treadmills are possibly one of the daftest things on the planet. Yes, they sort of avoid that classic virtual reality hazard of tripping over headset cables and falling flat on your face, offering a way for TRUE VR immersion seekers to feel like they're really 'in the game', so to speak, but a) they're crazy expensive, b) take up mountains of room, and c) you still look like an utter numpty running about on a treadmill with a pair of VR goggles strapped to your forehead.
Cybershoes' eponymous VR sandals, on the other hand, will still make you look like a bit of a numpty, but at least these let you run around virtual environments from the comfort of your own spinny chair, and are set to cost a heck of a lost less than their big, bulky rivals when they eventually launch in early 2019. Here's how I got on after trying out a pair for myself at Gamescom last month.
]]>OK! OK! Look, thank you, yes, yes, I know, thank you. Yes, it's very exciting that I'm here with this week's Steam Charts, but come on, please, sit down now, that's really enough. Oh, come on, all of you, you're lovely, but it's only little me. Goodness gracious!
]]>When it comes to mods for old games, I love seeing just how far their structure can be pushed with modern engines, but there's still some wisdom in the old ways. Viking-themed Doom mod Rekkr takes it all the way to the old school and back again, uphill both ways in freezing snow.
Built to authentic retro specs (making it compatible with even the original DOS version, should you so wish), there's no vertical aim, crouching or jumping here, just 25+ levels of weird techno-magical viking violence, with new enemies, weapons and art.
]]>Quake Champions is a fascinating experiment in remaking a game and trying to make that game both exactly like the original game but just More. The title has been impressively on top of their game, regarding monthly-ish updates and the addition of new characters, maps, and balance tweaks. They've also made the way that you and your pals explode into meat much more specific. Now, there's a way to free yourself of your terrible online name choices AND there's a beautiful, relaxing river cruise down The Molten Falls, in a newly added map.
]]>Update: The show is live right now. Tune in for games being thrashed to within an inch of their lives.
The Summer Nerd Olympics are almost upon us. Every six months, the best and brightest in gaming assemble under the Games Done Quick banner to demolish games extra-fast and raise heaving sacks of cash for good causes. This Sunday, the speedster swarm will be descending on Bloomington, Minnesota to destroy games as you know it, all in the name of supporting Doctors Without Borders. As usual, the whole thing will be streamed live on Twitch (and archived on YouTube) and runs for an entire week, 24/7.
Below, find some of our must-watch picks from the full schedule.
]]>I’m not sure about you lot, but I’m always worried that my eyes aren’t getting enough of a work out when I’m playing games. OMDO, then, might be exactly what I need to help me shed excess eye weight. It’s DOOM, but every frame is a autostereogram, hiding the screen inside a wall of dots. To see anything, your eyes will need to get off their lazy behinds and break a sweat.
]]>Id Software today announced Doom Eternal, a sequel to their unexpectedly great 2016 reboot of Doom. As in the series' original run, the sequel is bringing Hell to Earth, and it looks pleasingly meaty in the announcement trailer. Click on through to watch.
]]>Bulgaria is apparently the new home to Hell, as Universal Studios has just wrapped shooting there for a new Doom movie. Is it a sequel to the Doom movie that they made in 2005? Is it a redo of the game's story? If so, which of the many Dooms is it? Is it perchance based on the series of novel in 90s where the Mormons save Earth? It almost certainly is not! But from the first few set photos, we can tell that it looks like coordinators in a space place full of blood and, like, what else are you going to have in a Doom movie? That really covers the bases, production wise.
]]>Taken at face value The Forestale by solo indie dev Yorzh Aleksey isn't a particularly noteworthy game. A fairly standard 2.5D platformer, currently slated for release on Steam. It seems decent enough in a early 2000's kinda way, but the game itself isn't the interesting bit.
No, what makes The Forestale fascinating is that it's a full indie platformer developed entirely in the GZDoom engine. Yes, that GZDoom engine. The one that powers the likes of The Adventures Of Square, Castlevania: Simon's Destiny and, yes, even Brutal Doom. I've said it before, but Doom really is everything now.
]]>Wait, didn’t we already answer this question? Never mind, the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is not content with our list of the top 50 first-person shooters. Well, they're mostly fine with it (lists are stupid) but they still want to hash out this ageless question the old-fashioned way. By interrogating each other over the internet.
]]>Quake Champions: So nice, they made it twice. We all know about Bethesda/Id's revival of the arena shooter franchise, but don't go overlooking the Doom community's impressive QC:DE project, adapting the formula of the game to a more old-school engine with its own fresh collection of playable characters. This week, both got significant updates.
On Bethesda's side of the fence, the game now lets you be a Strogg Infiltrator from Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and wield the classic Quake 3 Plasma Gun, plus hop around a new map. On the Doom mod's side: For the first time in any kind of playable/voiced incarnation, it's evil AI Durandal from Marathon, plus a new set of expendable monsters for him to chew through offline. Within, character trailers and gameplay footage of both in action.
]]>The moon is made of cheese, and The Adventures of Square is at least 80% terrible geometry puns by weight, so an ideal candidate for RPS coverage. Built on the open-source GZDoom engine by BigBrik, a team of the best and brightest in the Doom modding scene, this free FPS borrows inspiration from old-school shooters far and wide but also feels like the missing link between the childish whimsy of Commander Keen and the unrelenting violence of the Doom series.
]]>This isn't Doom. It's a neural net's hallucination, based on a visual memory of Doom, played eternally by an AI agent tasked with surviving a growing deluge of imagined fireballs. You can take over with mouse or keyboard, if you'd like, and see how long you can survive the dream.
Created as part of a research project on 'dream' learning for AIs, we have the opportunity to not only observe, but play these snippets of mechanical dreaming, which AIs can, theoretically, train themselves on before being exposed to the real thing.
]]>It should almost go without saying now that Doom 2 is all things to all people, in the most literal sense. Thanks to 25 years of evolution in modding tools, it's Donkey Kong, Resident Evil and even Heroes of Might & Magic now, among other things.
The latest game to be swallowed by the all-consuming vortex of creativity that is the GZDoom-powered mod scene is Quake Champions. The arena FPS reboot may still be in public testing, but it's already been systematically disassembled, stripped for parts, and launched today as Quake Champions: Doom Edition (or QC:DE for short), a mod for possibly the most enduring game in PC history.
]]>They lurk, they creep, they skulk and weep. Monsters in videogames can be as simple as a big spiky cyclops ball, or as unsettling as a sobbing woman in a rainy alleyway. This week on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, the team is talking about their favourites, from flaming skulls to digitally possessed diving suits, and the clever ways in which game monsters inspire heebies, jeebies, creeps and sometimes even willies.
]]>Welcome to the freshly relaunched RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show! You might think this is episode 31, but actually it’s episode 1 again. We’re rebooting it, even though we just did that last year. We’ve started by making it more accessible. Instead of three of us chatting about videogames between snippets of jaunty music, there’s just a sad man saying “Sonic the Hedgehog” over and over. We’re confident you’ll like it.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>A classic Doom 2 combat scenario: A Revenant (its chaotic nature making it one of the most agitating skeletal foes in gaming history) runs headlong down a track. If it reaches its destination, it will inadvertently kill five Imps. If you choose to divert it, it will only kill one. What do you decide?
Okay, it's not much of a question - more Imp-murder is always good - but this and several dozen increasingly complex philosophical conundrums (plus a few surprises) await a baffled Doomguy in The Revenant Problem, a very silly Doom mod to cap off the venerable FPS's 24th year.
]]>Lest 2017 didn't already feel like the year in which everything happened all the time constantly, also joining the fray is Bethesda's three-pronged attempt to adapt their biggest games into virtual reality. Skyrim VR is PS4 exclusive for now, Fallout VR arrives on Steam in a fortnight, and DOOM VFR - well, that's today. Prepare for Cacovision.
]]>One of the best things about Doom is that there's a version of it for everybody. If you like your weapons a little more old-school and your Westerns thoroughly Weird, then High Noon Drifter might just be what you're looking for in a retro FPS.
It's High Noon (or was when I was writing this), so dust off your hat and slip into the well-worn cowboy boots of ghostly drifter Corzo for your regularly scheduled fix of demon-slaughter across a thousand worlds with an arsenal of chunky revolvers, lever-action shotguns and a vicious whip.
]]>Skeleton Appreciation Month has been, gone and shuffled back off to its grave, but I figure we can afford to extend the spooky festivities just a little while longer, especially with gems like this having snuck out in the final hours of October.
Castlevania: Simon's Destiny was released on Halloween day, and is a genuinely impressive fan-game, remaking the entirety of the original NES game in first-person perspective, all built on the open-source (and increasingly flexible) GZDoom engine. Well worth a play, if you feel you could do with a little more Dracula in your life.
]]>Brutal Doom in a nutshell: Doom 2's familiar (iconic?) Icon Of Sin battle re-purposed into the very image of heavy metal excess; No longer just a wall texture, the monster bobs and sways, protruding out from a wall of giant intestines surrounded by torrents of blood pouring into the arena, all whilst the player gracefully extends a middle finger on each hand.
It's been nearly two years since this juggernaut of Doom modding saw a major release, with its creator taking some time off to remake Doom 64 in the interim. Missing Halloween by just one day, this week saw the release of version 21 (albeit in beta form) and it feels like a milestone in its transformation into something almost entirely new, and distinct from both Doom of 1993, and Doom of 2016.
]]>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 today, and it's really quite brilliant so long as you don't mind being a little hurried.
]]>A couple of weeks back - when I also went hands-on with both Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and The Evil Within 2 - I goggled up and gave the upcoming VR version of 2016's Doom a spin, as well as bearing witness to other folks' flailing and giggling in Skyrim VR and Fallout VR. Bethesda's triptych of 3D ultravision spin-offs are due before the year is out, with Skyrim only available on PSVR at least initially and Fallout and Doom only officially supporting HTC Vive, for obvious reasons. Their arrival is a pretty big event for a technology that so far has leaned far more heavily on brand new things rather than established names.
Curious about what this means for the technology and for Doom, Skyrim and Fallout, I picked Bethesda VP Pete Hine's brains about the whys and wherefores, and what it might imply for the future of their own VR efforts. Also below: my own quick impressions of Doom VFR [official site].
]]>As you may have spotted, Humble has been running an 'End of Summer Sale' over the past few days to ring in the Autumn and, well, discount a bunch of games. The sale only has a few days left to run and the final wave of titles has been added as of today. This batch is entirely from Bethesda and features some of the company's best stuff - from Doom to Wolfenstein to Call of Cthulu. Just me on that last one? (it did sneak into our list of best horror games! - ed).
You have a few days left to pick up this range or any number of discounts (like Hitman's entire first season) before the sale is gone for good.
]]>Well even if the Sun won't shine, the Steam Charts can still spread brightness into our lives. By some manner of wondrous majjicks, this week's chart doesn't even include H1Z1, Fallout 4, nor The Witcher 3! I barely even know what to do with myself. I'm dizzy! Come, join the celebration.
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