One of the earliest gaming gamer memories i have is playing Doom (and Wolfenstein) with my dad, him working the directional keys and me smacking spacebar repeatedly on every wall, hoping for a secret door. Since then I have hopped into Doom intermittenly for 20+ years, but I never really sat and played it front to back.

I’ve been getting more gray hairs lately, I stare at them in the mirror. I don’t think it bothers me that much but I do this daily, multiple times a day. Maybe I can prolong a thing or two by completing the video games I loved but never finished back when I had no gray hairs.

As much as I love the name of this video game, i can’t help but think that “Boom” or “Zoom” would’ve been equally as effective.

Anyway, E1-E3 is pure game, rich and robust juice, no pulp. E4 is something that I also ended up playing, and then I marked it completed it on Backloggd. E1-E3 is a rollie coastie of running, and then gunning, and then searching. E4 is the “funhouse” trailer at the local fire department fair, a cheap thrill if you will. The amount of buttons I pushed in E4 that resulted in the wall behind me opening to reveal enemies in a closet makes me question a thing or two. Question one being “what the hell?” and question two being “can you not???”

idk man Doom rules and makes me so happy. I played it on switch and it feels so good with a controller. Maybe we don’t have to be so married to the “FPS needs to be fully 3D” idea.

I think this game rules only when there’s a degree of separation from it, with that separation being not actually playing the game. It’s great in an academic sense, it’s really impressive for it’s time and in some aspects it’s aged incredibly well. That being said it also has hammer-to-brain levels of tedious trial and error, making me go fucking loco and koo koo. I also had to watch the final sequence on youtube because my big buddy stopped getting triggered, despite starting from the same checkpoint each time.