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LEGACY OF DOOM

I've been playing the DOOM series for over twenty years and I am a huge fan of this ultra-violent sci-fiction action shooter.Of all the games I've ever played Doom is the one that I always come back too.There a million reasons why I love these games but I will try to briefly explain what it is that I find so fucking cool about it.

The setting: Get your arse to Mars

There is something about Mars itself that has inspired many writers and artists. I've been fascinated by our distant neighbor since childhood.With Its blood red color, its scarred surface and deep canyons it is a planet full of mystery and speculation about its past continue to this very day. Has it harbored life at once time and does it continue to do so?

Doom takes place in the future, at the Union Aerospace research facility.You play   Marine without a name (AKA DOOMGUY) who arrives at the facility to find it overrun by hordes of Demons from another dimension.This catastrophe happened when scientists working on a teleportation project at the facility, experimented with alien technology from an extinct martian civilization.

The player embarks on a blood-soaked odyssey through the facility, taking on wave after wave of demons and possessed personnel in a bid to stop the evil forces from attacking Earth and find a way escape the facility.

Inspiration

The game plays like the love child of James Camerons Action epic Aliens (1986) And Sam Rami's Evil Dead 2.(1987)

Evil Dead:  takes place in a cabin in the woods when A young couple visit for a romantic weekend and accidently unleash the forces of hell when they play a tape recording of the former occupant reciting incantations from a book made of flesh called the Necronomicon.

Aliens:  is set on another world where a human colony has been overrun by an infestation of alien warriors and a group of special forces is sent to rescue the colonists.

The game makers  John D Carmack and John Romero also drew inspiration from the dungeon and dragons role playing games and cover art from Heavy metal albums when designing the game levels.

The game's musical score is a mix of synthesized,  heavy metal inspired guitar riffs that blend seamlessly with the game environments.

The high energy bombastic beats and rhythms are there to engage the player and inspire them to kick demonic ass.The game's music was composed by Bobby Prince, who took inspiration from Alice in chains and Pantera.The group nine inch nails were huge fans of doom and its soundtrack that they offered to work on the developer's next project  Quake.

The gameplay is influenced by Id software  Wolfenstein 3D and Pacman oddly enough.

Pacman is a game where you are a little yellow circle in a maze being chased by ghosts until you eat all the little pills in the labyrinth. The maze concept was adapted to a 3D environment with nazis and demons replacing the ghosts.

like Doom Wolfenstein 3d is a first person shooter inspired by the 1981 Muse software game Castle Wolfenstein. the player is Allied spy Willian Blazkowicz, who escapes from a nazi prison and carries out missions.Like doom, the player traverses through each of the game's levels to find an elevator that leads to the next one.

The game was a huge success and followed up by a sequel Doom 2: Hell on earth in 1995.There is no big difference between doom one and two. Technologically, graphically it's substantially the same experience as the first except the events is moved from Mars to Earth and demons invade the homeworld.But it did have multiplayer and was the first to be distributed by retailers.

To be honest am not even sure which one I played first. I do remember playing one of them in 1995 and Wolfenstein as well. I remember  I just saw the marine wielding the shotgun and thought "Holy fuck they did it". They finally made a game like this: 

I didn't even get the references to the evil dead at this point.The Evil dead was still banned in the UK in 1995 as a "video nasty"

But the shotgun and chainsaw and demon hordes all owe a debt to the Evil dead series.In 1995 the graphics and animations were impressive but they still looked like cartoon pixels and you know life went on, and I mostly forgot about doom until 2004 when they released doom 3.

DOOM 3

Doom 3 is the reason I wanted to write this article.I know a lot of doom fans fucking hate this game but I love it for all the reasons they hate it and I just want to explain why I love this game.why I have bought it three times. ( Xbox, ps3, and Xbox one respectively).

one of my favorite genres is cosmic horror. books, music, movies, games you name it. H.P Lovecraft  Mountains of madness  Alien, the thing dead space, Hellboy, shit even Event horizon I'm in.I also love horror movies like evil dead, dusk till dawn, American werewolf in London so when I played doom 3 back in 2004  for me it was cosmic gaming nirvana.

Simply put It's a fucking haunted house in space. They used this new game engine to create this world that rendered lighting and shadows and incredible animations.I played it with a headset, lights out, sound up on a large screen and it blew me away.

It has a story which is similar to the first game so it's kind of a reboot whatever, the sound design, the voice acting, the music, the level and creature design, the use of light and dark  all of it creates this insanely intense atmosphere, the enemies come at you and its relentless and just keeps getting harder and harder.

They have these disks you pick up those play recordings of personnel at the base that play as you traverse the level. It's just great really great. I've watched videos on youtube where people diss this game and how it wasn't true to the original but personally, I didn't fucking care. for me, ID hit the ball out of the fucking park. I've bought this game like three times, its that good.

The BFG edition. This is just a game I always have to have in my collection. The rest I don't give a shit about.There are other great games but this is maybe the only game I replay over and over again even when I complete it.In fact, to tell the truth, I have never completed it.I've been close but my son deleted my progress one time and I had to do the whole thing again and I never did get there because I've played on the intense difficulty setting because I love how intense and scary it is.This game makes me jump, I've been playing it for nearly fourteen years and it still makes me jump.Name another game that can do that or a movie?Deadspace is close and it is a damn good game as well but doom 3 is the daddy.

I really enjoyed the story its got a real B-movie vibe but it has an interesting backstory and your always happy to meet surviving human NPC's. you're a marine doing a tour on Mars and pretty soon the base is overrun by hordes of demons and it's a bloodbath and your fighting for your life to escape and stop them getting to earth. They are monsters and mad scientists and trigger-happy marines but its done so well and with so much detail. The passion of the developers bleeds of every frame and pixel. while it has dated over the years it isn't cartoony like the first two games or even the most recent one Doom (2016).

DOOM 2016

So last year they released DOOM (2016) and I was excited about this game. I played it and my thoughts honestly were "What the Fuck".Gone are the shadows and light, gone are the jump scares and tension, gone is the b-movie story and recordings.Instead, its a fast paced frantic arcade shooter with a heavy metal soundtrack and comic book visuals. As I played the game I admit it grew on me and as  I progressed I grew to love this game as well. It is really fun with a decent multiplayer and a mod creator.The level design is really awesome in particular and I really enjoyed the fast pace action, the weapons, and the enemies.

The music and sound design are really fucking cool... BUT I was disappointed that they ditched the horror aspects and scares. I understand why. it's a different kind of game to the previous Doom 3 and I was hoping they would have continued the haunted house experience, with a modern consoles power, advanced graphics, and animations.I don't think they ever will now because so many people think doom 3 sucked and that this game is the best thing ever.So I didn't hate this game, It has a lot of great things but it I wasn't scared when I was playing this game, like afraid to walk through the door like the last and well for me that's a really fucking shame.Doom is a cosmic horror action shooter and with this title, they ditched the Horror and made a heavy metal musical action shooter instead.

So last thing I want to get off my chest about Doom

God that fucking movie

so a few months into playing Doom 3 back in 2004, I read an article in empire magazine that announced that Universal studios were adapting Doom for the big screen.I couldn't believe it I was so excited. Dwayne Johnson and Karl Urban were cast With Rosamund Pike.

Look at her, isn't she  lovely 

Can you smell what the rock is cooking

you talking to me?

I got even more excited when I read that it was based on Doom 3 and was going to be R-rated. 

Just look at these promotion photos. I was freaking hyped for this.

The budget was reportedly 60 million dollars which are a modest amount for a sci-fi film in 2004 but still quite a lot. (Aliens was made for around half / all three Evil dead movies for not even a quarter of that budget.)

The same year saw the release of these other films: Constantine, Zathura, Amityville horror, Land of the dead and Serenity, all of which cost less or the same as doom to produce.They reason I am going into such detail is because my biggest gripe with Doom the movie is how fucking cheap it looks.It looks as if it was filmed inside an eastern European laser game hall.

Man all they had to do was take the sets, costumes, and props from aliens and creature design and wacky camerawork from evil dead.hire the same guy who did the sound and music from the game and write a script that cherry picks from both movies and the original game.Hire a DP who can photograph shadows and light correctly and this would have been a monster hit. They didn't do any of this things and it fucking dived bombed big time.

The creatures look fine and the guns and cast look the part. But the film is a mess. all he had to do at worse was redo Dusk to dawn and reset it from a strip club to a space station.In fact, Dusk till dawn is as close as you will get to a doom movie and it only cost 19 million dollars and looked great and it was amazing.But that film was written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodrigez.This piece of shit was directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak( an oscar winning cinematographer no less) with a background in stylistic action movies.Maybe I'm being harsh on the movie. 

Maybe 60 million dollars is insufficient to create a movie that is faithful to the games triple a game production values.I've seen episodes of Doctor who that have better production values.To be fair even if the production design was any good you wouldn't have known because the film is so fucking dark you can't see what is going on half the time.Apart from aliens vs predator requiem, I have never seen a film so poorly lit in my life.Again it's a shame because they are some good moments in this film.The cast does their best to inject some emotion and life into script heavy with exposition.The end money shot of a first person rampage through the facility is pretty cool to see. But it's jarred into a film that tries to emulate Paul Andersons Resident evil instead of Aliens and evil dead ( you know the fucking movies that inspired the game).

another film Like doom is John Carpenters Ghosts of Mars.its a b-movie made for less than thirty million dollars but you can still accept the fact its supposed to be set on mars and V/H/S 2: Safe Haven,  a doom inspired short made for less than 10,000 dollars from the director of the raid.