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| A lovely doom landscape, you don't see that too often. |
Originally back in 1993 ID software created Doom, Doom 1, the
original Doom, whatever you want to call it, and the world rejoiced etc etc.
The game itself was split into three chapters Knee-Deep in the Dead, The
Shores of Hell and Inferno where the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) who
remind me a lot of the Aliens
series’ Weyland-Yutani
corporation, are conducting experiments on interdimensional travel accidentally
open a portal to Hell and the protagonist (I will call him Doomguy) Fights
across the zombie and demon infested UAC bases on the moons of Phobos and Deimos orbiting the
planet Mars, then
eventually travelling to Hell
itself. Then in 1994 Doom II: Hell on Earth was released, this was the first
Doom that I played though this was the Doom 95 version released a year
later and as the game says, The Legions of Hell have invaded earth, so this
time you are fighting on your home planet.
After that came The Ultimate Doom in 1995 which contained the original 3 chapters and a new one Thy Flesh Consumed which acted as both a sequel to Doom and a prequel to Doom II. And then we go onto the last or final official instalments of the original Doom series, Final Doom was released in 1996 and included the standalone Doom II IWADs (Doom Game files): TNT: Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment which were created semi-independently and were each regarded as a separate sequels to Doom II so had no chronological order from one over the other.
After that came The Ultimate Doom in 1995 which contained the original 3 chapters and a new one Thy Flesh Consumed which acted as both a sequel to Doom and a prequel to Doom II. And then we go onto the last or final official instalments of the original Doom series, Final Doom was released in 1996 and included the standalone Doom II IWADs (Doom Game files): TNT: Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment which were created semi-independently and were each regarded as a separate sequels to Doom II so had no chronological order from one over the other.
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| TNT Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment were part of Final Doom |
I have now played through every single one with TNT
Evilution being the last. You may be wondering why I chose this one as the
first one to review on my blog, well it’s for several reasons: The first being
that this was the latest one I have played so it will be fresh in my mind, the
second reason is that it’s almost a standalone story so it doesn’t really matter
if you haven’t experienced the original two, thirdly, It’s the only one I had
recorded screenshots and videos of :D and fourthly, I’m going to use this to
introduce the Skulltag Mod which is what
I used to play them all through, though I may not use again when I re-play all
of the games through once more. This won’t be the longest review as we all know
about Doom and how it works, I just wanted to explain the mod I have been using
and show off the changes to the game when using it, and the only screenshots
and videos I have are from TNT Evilution so I will use it as the game that is
in review.
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| Wow this looks different |
So before I begin I will first introduce the Skulltag Mod. The Skulltag mod
was created by Matthew 'Agent Spork'
McGee and is one of many “conversion” or perhaps “light conversion” source
ports for the original Doom series games and was based on the ZDoom source port which included
the new graphics and control/gameplay abilities. As the site says it “Brings
Doom into the 21st century” and it does this by adding many new
options and game features including graphics overhaul, with the ability to pick
any modern resolution with much more refined textures and dynamic lighting.
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| Detailed display options and openGL in DOOM? what trickery is this? |
It
introduced new weapons such as the Minigun which is a faster version of the Chaingun and the Railgun which
we all know from Quake 2,
I really enjoyed these new weapons and used them often, they reminded me of
that forgotten “Q2 Xtreme” mod I used to use to play Quake 2, I really need to
work out where that went. But anyway probably the most important changes are to
the gameplay, the mod allows for free mouselook and includes several custom
crosshairs and also include the ability to jump and duck. These kinds of things
change the original game around completely as you know in the original Doom
games you could not jump, crouch or look up or down relying on auto-aiming to
hit enemies above or below you. Now with modern FPS controls it’s pretty nuts
and playing the game this way borders on cheating, using the sprint ability
then jumping allows you to leap great distances and because all of the original
WAD’s were not built for these features you have no idea whether you are
supposed to be able to get to certain places or not.
Nevertheless I could not imagine going back to play the
original way, the first time I experienced Doom using the mod I couldn’t
believe how good it was, it looked amazing, the mod actually has many features
for online play including Team DM, Duel, CTF and the namesake game mode
’Skulltag’ where players aim to capture each others skulls and take them to an
altar. The first I played I tried out a Deathmatch mode with bots and wow it
was fun, I haven’t tried since I’ve just been having fun with the usual
singleplayer but man playing that with 5 bots and watching rockets fly past
with new lighting effects was crazy. Currently my Doom folder contains all
kinds of mods and it’s hard to discern what each of them do, so to explain I
have included a description.
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| Well I could, make it up to that ledge to get to the yellow door but I know I'm not supposed to be able to. |
A short video of the Skulltag game mode with bots on the Ring of Fire map
With the exception of Doomseeker, all of these are Source Ports of the original
Doom most often made by fans, they often contain slight-to-heavy tweaking of
the game engine including new features inc graphics, gameplay, game modes,
weapons and levels.
ZDoom – A
source port which modernizes Doom with a range of features including new
graphics and control/gameplay abilities
GZDoom – A
port of ZDoom itself which uses the same features except adds OpenGL
support for higher resolution graphics and particles
Skulltag –
The mod I currently use, also uses features from ZDoom and GZDoom and adds
online/multiplayer features.
ZDaemon – A
mod purposely-built for playing multiplayer Doom over the Internet, based on ZDoom
Doomseeker
- a server browser for client/server source ports,
available for Windows, Linux and MacOS X. It supports Skulltag, Odamex, ZDaemon, Vavoom and Chocolate
Doom through individual plugins.
There are many, many, other Source Ports available for
Doom as this is just a few that I use, you may have also heard of Brutal Doom, I hadn’t paid
much heed to it but after doing some research for my current review I came
across some videos
which featured Brutal Doom being played with OpenGL graphics and it looked
goddamn amazing, of course there does seem to be a bit too much bloom with fire
and explosions (Battlefield
1 seems to have this issue as well) and also man that bloom on the toxic
barrels is too much, I realised just recently that the Skulltag mod has the
option to run the game in the software graphics (Doom Engine) or hardware
graphics (OpenGL) I didn’t really pay too much attention to this as I didn’t
have much idea what it was for and playing Doom with 1920x1080 resolution was
good enough for me. Brutal Doom has many new features including a few new
weapons and revamped old weapons with new graphics and sound, new enemy
abilities and death animations inc ‘fatalities’, revamped HUD and as the name
adheres to, lots and lots of gore. The mod is supposed to be much harder than
the original Doom but I’m still thinking of using it to play through the Doom
series again as I could possibly lower the difficulty and gore to acceptable
levels.
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| The menu for the skulltag mod allows you to choose which game (or WAD file rather) that you would like to play. |
Brutal Doom - A Mod I plan to use in the future.
Speaking of level of difficulty I remember in my younger
days I cheated a lot, in singleplayer of course, there will never be a time
where I cheat in multiplayer. Yes I found cheats for almost every game I played
and in my defense I said it made the game more enjoyable because it wasn’t as
hard or frustrating, well obviously. Though little did I know that all you had
to do was lower the difficulty (to say ‘easy’) then all will be fine, well
mostly, I’m playing Star Wars: Tie
Fighter at the moment and it’s getting damn hard even on easy, but that’s
what I have been doing recently with my gaming and I have found it’s been
ultimately more enjoyable than just being an unstoppable demigod. With older
games such as Doom and Quake I went from playing with invincibility and
unlimited ammo to just invincibility then finally only recently to no cheating
albeit on easy mode and I’m quite satisfied with that, I used the second lowest
skill level setting “Hey
not too rough” which is the least amount of enemies but you take the normal amount
of damage as opposed to “I’m too young to die” in which you take half damage. I
only switched to this possibly 1/3rd of the way through TNT
Eviliution so the majority of the series I played like a goddamn Saint Diviner
of Justice coming to wreak explosive death upon the denizens of Hell with blah
blah blah let’s get on with the review…..
I warp to one of my favorite levels, Mount Pain and start in god mode then realize I'm in god mode then switch it off hah.
I warp to one of my favorite levels, Mount Pain and start in god mode then realize I'm in god mode then switch it off hah.
So now you know the story behind the original Doom series and the mods I used to play the game and the settings we can talk about the actual game itself.
TNT
Evilution released on June 17, 1996, forms one half of Final Doom,
a commercial product which consists of two 32-level IWADs (the other being The Plutonia Experiment), similar to Doom II. The
"TNT" in the title stands for "The New Technology" and is
also the name of the mapping team who created TNT: Evilution. The game was
originally going to be free of charge but was packaged with The Plutonia
Experiment in Final Doom as a publishing deal brokered by the infamous John Romero
and thus being released by id Software. The story behind TNT Evilution is nothing
too special, just an excuse to shoot the crap out of the denizens of hell
(though who needs an excuse really) The ill fated UAC has again been
experimenting with portal technology to try and annihilate the forces of hell,
they seem to succeed but then a vast demonic spaceship from Hell appears and
destroys the base zombifying everyone. Now this is the part I love, the Doomguy apparently
escaped death or zombification by being “away on a walk at the time”, yes, a walk, and then vows to destroy all of
the legions of hell defeating another Demon-Spitter
yadda yadda yadda.
TNT Evilution has a very techbase feel to it, similar to the
first episode of the original Doom, whereas
The Plutonia experiment has a more natural earth feel to it. TNT’s levels go
from experimental labs, to military bases, to interesting looking levels at
night and back to hell again. I must admit it did take me awhile to complete
with 32 levels (including secrets levels) this and the Plutonia experiment took
me quite a lot of breaks, mainly because I had not played the levels before and
it took me awhile to work out what to do and where to go. The levels in this
series I noticed differed in quite a few ways from the norm of Doom and Doom 2,
there were many tricks and unconventional ways of completing the levels, for
example the end room and switch wasn’t always through the same style of door
and what you thought was the end of the level wasn’t always the case.
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| Yes it's another Demon-Spitter, not again! |
The shipping/respawning level which has quite a few new textures and objects and I don't do much here except get lost, I eventually worked out the key was inside a box under a desk, very unusal for Doom I can tell you that.
It was
obvious that the designers were creating these levels as a challenge expansion
not holding your hand like in the previous games. I saw quite a few objects and
textures that were definitely not from the original Doom series especially
modern technology and furniture, fences, gatehouses and other things that
weren’t in the original, the levels also had more of a sporadic design and used
unconventional architecture which sometimes include wide open spaces like in Level 27: Mount Pain. Playing
the mod also made things very different being able to look all around obviously
had some interesting effects on gameplay, I’ve already mentioned the ability to
jump created “I can just jump there but I don’t think I’m supposed to” moments
and there was also the fact that Doom was never actually 3D.
So you can basically look straight up and down with the mouse and watch the
monsters turn into a single vertical line, this made me laugh a few times but
it’s expected and a reminder of what the Doom Engine
actually was.
The Storage Facility level where I do a heap of looking and jumping with the new controls.
The new weapons made things much more interesting, the
Minigun made wasting zombies and imps much quicker and even some demons didn’t
take too long to kill, the new Grenade Launcher put a more tactical spin on
rockets allowing them to bounce so you could hit targets around corners, the
Railgun was probably my favourite addition as it was very powerful with one
shot killing those pesky Lost Souls and with the crosshair you could shoot them
from miles away. There was also this pretty cool looking rapid-fire version of
the BFG but I preferred to use
the old one, I guess this one with its faster firing would be more useful for
clearing tons of monsters. Playing with these new weapons and gameplay changes
put a great spin on the game and it was very refreshing and felt good to go
through, like a breath of fresh air, hopefully more games can do this *cough* Mercenaries
*cough* TNT Evilution wasn’t the best Doom experience I’ve had it was the most
rewarding being the first time I have played Doom for an extended period
without invincibility, and I actually enjoyed it ;).
I will still go through all the previous games again though
it’s questionable whether I do it with Skulltag or Brutal Doom, though Brutal
Doom actually has its own Story mode which looks freakin insane in its
own right and since it was made to be played with the Brutal doom mod then I
think that would be the best way to experience Brutal doom first hand and if
after that I can’t go back to the normal way then I’ll brutally blast though
the originals too. Though there’s something to be said about the comfort of the
original style, so you may not have seen the last of Skulltag yet.
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| I let loose a bouncy grenade. |
JD
The Skulltag 97d trailer
Just can’t get enough
of Hell
