slowly starting to see myself take interest in shooters so I thought I'd give the OG another go; I'm not too huge on it anymore? probably my favorite game movement-wise and shooting demons is plenty fun, but I kept finding myself slightly irritated by enemy placement and having to walk a marathon finding key doors and such. I think I always go into this game thinking it's going to be adrenaline-fueled armageddon and forget how much puzzle there is to it (similarly with how uninterested I am in the soundtrack as a whole despite a few ripping tracks). 3 episodes is a little too much for me as well, I definitely got my fix of everything after completing just the first one. zero interest in playing through episode 4 or even DOOM II which is sad but it is what it is.

Doom ha pasado de ser el padre de los juegos de disparos en primera persona, a ser casi el abuelo. Más de treinta años después se sigue manteniendo como un juego sólido y divertido. El buen diseño de niveles no envejece, y más en un juego pionero como lo fue Doom en su época.

Doom popularizó y perfeccionó la propuesta que hizo un año antes ID software, con el desarrollo de wolfenstein 3D. Mientras que este primero sería algo más experimental, consagrándose como el primer FPS en la historia, Doom refinaría la fórmula presentada y daría un salto abismal en la complejidad y diseño de los escenarios. Sus niveles están perfectamente confeccionados, tanto a nivel de ambientación como jugable. Sumas ese buen diseño con una jugabilidad simple pero innovadora para su época y tienes la receta de uno de los juegos más influyentes de la historia. Porque la jugabilidad de Doom se basa en disparar armas de fuego mientras te mantienes en movimiento para evitar a los enemigos. Si habéis jugado alguno de los doom modernos, veréis que es exactamente lo mismo que se hacía en el 93 pero ahora con escopetas con gancho. Es un bucle jugable que funciona muy bien. De hecho, me encanta ver el boom que hay actualmente con el género “boomer shooter”, que ha derivado en las diferentes interpretaciones de esta jugabilidad.

Sin embargo, pese a que alabo mucho el diseño de niveles de doom, creo que es algo heterogéneo. Hay un salto grande en la calidad de los niveles del primer capítulo, a los dos que prosiguen. Mientras que el primero se siente perfectamente ejecutado, los otros por su parte se sienten algo mejorables. No todo es malo ojo, hay algunos niveles muy buenos en esos capítulos también, pero es innegable notar la bajada de calidad.

En definitiva Doom es una obra impasible al paso del tiempo, su entretenido bucle jugable y un diseño de niveles sólido, lo mantienen a día de hoy como un juego muy decente si quieres pasar una tarde entretenida acompañado de una banda sonora excepcional.

Informational review regarding versions, controls and engines.

This product was previously sold as the "Ultimate Doom" version of the game, which came out in 1995 and featured the original Doom (1993) and the expansion pack: "Episode IV: Thy Flesh Consumed" for MS-DOS. It was emulated with DOSBox here on steam.

In 2019, for Doom's 25th anniversary, id Software released an updated version of the game running on the Unity engine which was ported to the 8th generation consoles. This update, called Doom Enhanced, was later released here on steam as a free update to previous owners of Ultimate Doom, they also changed the store name to DOOM (1993). Fortunately, the original emulated DOS version still comes with this one. The same applies to the steam version of Doom II as well.

This new re-release, marketed as "Enhanced version", was made in a similar way to the community source ports, like GZDOOM or PrBoom+. It had numerous problems when it released but they managed to fix pretty much all the issues and is now considered a very good port. It unfortunately isn't as good as the community source ports in regards to mod support. Despite that, if you're just looking to play a very authentic Doom experience with modern QoL features like 60 fps, high resolution and widescreen support, the Enhanced version is probably the best place to start.

Nerve Software and Bethesda seem to have aimed for a very vanilla and conservative port, something more akin to the original experience. It even renders the game at a 640x400 resolution internally regardless of the selected output resolution, resulting in a very crisp but low-res image and without the downsides of running a resolution non-native to your monitor. This choice obviously makes the image look "worse" but the chunky pixels fit well with the low-res textures and is more authentic to how the graphics were designed to look. It's a matter of preference though and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an option to change that.

Nevertheless, If you're looking for the actual vanilla game, you can play the DOSBox version by selecting it in the launch options. You can choose either the DOS version with modern WASD controls or classic controls, in which you move with the arrow keys. Speaking of controls, you can also choose to play with keyboard aiming or mouse aiming, which were both a feature even on the original Doom back in 1993. Although many people claim that Doom only had keyboard controls back in the 90s, that isn't true and is a classic case of the Mandela effect. It is true that many people at the time preferred keyboard aiming but the game actually came out with mouse controls from the get go. John Romero even went on to say that Doom was made for mouse input, so was Wolfenstein 3d (source: soulsphere.org).

The original game didn't have vertical aiming however, that's due to a rendering limitation of the engine. Meaning you could only look left and right and not up and down. Back then, calculating perspective was really taxing on performance, so less angles = faster.

The first FPS that featured unrestricted vertical mouse-look was Bungie's Marathon back in 1994. Although Ultima Underworld (1992) rendered up and down angles, you had to click the edges of the screen to manipulate the camera. Heretic (1994, Doom engine), while giving you the option to look up and down, restricted it to very small angles and you had to control it via keyboard. In 1995, 3D Realm took note of Bungie's breakthrough and added a similar mouse-look control in its Build engine (Duke Nukem 3D 1996). That said, all of these games that let you control the camera vertically one way or another, didn't really re-render the scene like you'd expect and relied on visual trickeries to change the view. They did it by shifting the horizon line up or down instead of changing your perspective, that's so they didn't need to calculate any of the 3-point perspective distortions that we see in the real world. Hence why they all felt unnatural.

These engine limitations were one of the reasons that Quake (1996) was such a big deal when it came out, and why people call earlier FPS titles 2.5D in retrospect. It wasn't until Quake that full 3-point perspective became a norm in the industry, made possible with the arrival of hardware acceleration technologies. Eventually, since the release of Doom engine's source code in 1999, various community source ports were made. Some, such as GZDOOM added hardware-acceleration rendering options like OpenGL and Vulkan, which allowed real up and down perspective rendering like Quake and all modern 3D games.

Here are a couple of useful tips if you're playing in the DOSBox version:

Movement was binded to mouse input, overlapping your movement keys which will feel very strange if you're used to more modern FPS movement controls. You can disable this forward and backward movement with novert.

You should also correct the aspect ratio to the original 4:3 otherwise the game will look squashed. That's because, like many games at the time, the original graphics were designed for monitors that vertically stretched the image natively. I.e. the original 320x200 resolution is a 16:10 logical aspect ratio but ran on monitors with a 4:3 aspect ratio that stretched the image up and down to fit it, and at the time, graphics were designed to account for that. To correct this, just change the following lines on ultimatem.conf and ultimate.conf files in the game folder to:


[sdl]
output=ddraw

And:

[render]
aspect=true

Both of these issues were already corrected in the Unity source port (Enhanced Version).

(This review was first written on Steam -- 26 August, 2023)

Following up on Wolfenstein 3D just a year later, id Software managed to improve upon their own classic formula in just about every way with Doom. Rather than using the same engine, John Carmack had already written a new one for this game, which in turn allowed for more intricate level designs featuring switches, verticality and outdoor areas.

The art design shifted to more fantastic and blood-soaked sci-fi setting compared to Wolfenstein's relatively sedate nazi murder dungeons and accompanied again by a metal soundtrack and improved sound design for the weapons and the various creatures you would mow down with your arsenal of firearms.

The same smooth gameplay from Wolfenstein carried over to this game, and coupled with the improved visuals and more dynamic levels, Doom set a new standard for the first person shooter genre, as well as doubling down on a template that would continue to influences hundreds of games going forward.