01: New Year´s Doom

The year isn´t even a week old and I have already beaten the first game in my attempt at the 52 Game Challenge and it is a regular one for me and that´s because of a little tradition of mine. You see, every year on January 1st I play through the original 3 Episodes of Doom. I have done this for the last decade or so and I do this to, in a methaphorical sense, show everything that went wrong in the previous year who is the boss. Why only Doom and not Ultimate Doom? Simply because I don´t like the 4th Episode. And even though I have played through it so many times by now using a lot of the official ports and fanmade sourceports I wouldn´t consider myself to be an expert when it comes to this game. The highes difficulty I can beat it at is "Hurt me plenty" and I don´t even know all the secrets on E1M1. The gameplay itself is easy enough to understand: Kill everything that moves and that isn´t you and find the exit. To find that exit more often than not you have flick some switches, collect different keycards and try to not get lost in the labyrinth-like levels. And these well designed levels can get fairly and complicated due to how the Doom-Engine itself works. Maps have to be build around the limitation that you can´t have multiple room´s above each other, and you probably won´t notice that unless someone point´s it out to you. Some of the maps make it even more confusing with teleporters that move you all around the map. The original PC-Version has a really awesome MIDI-Rock / Metal Soundtrack that is inspired by Hard Rock and Metal Songs from the late 80´s and early 90´s and it fit´s the fast gameplay really well and with the much more recent XBox Live Arcade / Domm 3 BFG Edition version of the game this Soundtrack really comes to live. To make all the Demon-killing easier you get small, but varied set of guns, my personal preffered tools of destruction are the Shotgun and the Chaingun, depending on the enemy I´m dealing with, the plasma gun get´s rid of larger groups with ease and the powerful rocketlauncher is something you have to use with caution because you can easily kill yourself with the blast radius. Your Pistol becomes obsolete the moment you get the Shotgun and the ultimate demon destroyer is the now legendary BFG-9000, this slow firing beast destroys everything hat´s comes a bit too close to it. This game comes highly recommended, even more than two decades after it´s initial release.