Barring some shocking upheaval… I have found my 2018 WAD of the year. Dimension of the Boomed is Doom meets Quake — two of my favorite things together at last — but Boomed isn’t just Quake wallpaper pasted over the old Doom paint. And it’s not one of those uninspired “Game X in Game Y” conversions you used to see all the time either. It’s so much more than the sum of its two more obvious parts. It’s the perfect balance of the grim, haunting look of Quake, and the fast, violent action of Doom, sure — but those alone do not a good WAD
Tag: Doom
Griefless
For months now, I’ve been toiling away on a huge, multi-megaWAD retrospective — playing these epic WADs that each take weeks to finish, and then trying to make sense of my thoughts and put it all down in writing. (EDIT: Hilariously, this is referring to my piece on skillsaw that didn’t get finished until 2022.) And while I’m smashing my head against a brick wall on that project, little WADs like Griefless give me the will to live. Griefless is the latest from James “Jimmy” Paddock, the Doom community’s resident jack of all trades (and master of all of them). Jimmy’s mapping
Icon, Citywars, and Evilcore
Daniel Remar is better known for his standalone games — stuff like Hyper Princess Pitch, or two of my all-time favorite games, Iji and Hero Core. He’s so much more known for those that I didn’t even realize he made Doom WADs until a few weeks ago. If the dude makes such brilliant games, he must make some dope Doom WADs, right? Well, out of the six WADs he hosts on his website, I’ve picked out three that I’d consider awesome, if a little basic. They’re presented here in what I think is chronological order; unfortunately they aren’t packaged with documentation, so release
Doom II The Way id Did
Doom II The Way id Did. You already know what this is. You know whether or not you’ll enjoy it. What are you doing still reading this? Doom II The Way id Did is exactly what you expect, even if you haven’t had the pleasure of playing Doom The Way id Did, or the number of WADs that followed on in that vein for years. It’s a collection of 33 maps by various authors in the community, all doing their best impressions of John Romero, American McGee, and Sandy Petersen (plus maybe a tiny bit of Shawn Green and Tom
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 2004
Like everybody else in 2004, I was eagerly awaiting Half-Life 2. But I wouldn’t be a massive Doom geek if I wasn’t looking forward to Doom 3 more. I was 16 when Doom 3 came out in the summer of 2004. I’d been back into the Doom scene for a solid two years, probably more, and that’s on top of Doom having been one of the biggest games in my house for most of the ’90s. I was making my first maps at this point, awful as they might have been. Doom was in my blood, and I was ready
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1997
1997’s “game” is a late entry on this list. If you looked at the thumbnail previews before today, you might have been able to identify a screencap from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, which is most certainly not what is pictured in the banner above. I wanted desperately to feature Turok as a part of this retrospective, as a game very dear to my heart, and one of the first I can recall that was a real social gaming experience. I didn’t own it, so I was forced to go to friends’ houses and play, and those friends and I spent many
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1996
1996. Enter WarCraft II. Or… more specifically, WarCraft II‘s map editor. Or even more specifically, the map editor for WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal — the expansion to the original game, which was the version of it that I owned. Beyond the Dark Portal came out in 1996, a year after OG WarCraft II, which conveniently allows me to sneak it onto this list! I’ve told this story a little out of order. The journey that started as a taste of creation in the early 1990s with SimCity — and ultimately led to creating full game mods in the 2000s with Doom — was
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1993
On that same shareware collection that brought Wolfenstein 3D onto my family’s home computer, there was another, even more important game to me. Probably the most important game in my life. We’re talking, of course, about Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. Nah, I’m just messing with you. We’re talking about DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! As good as it was, there’s no surprise Blake Stone is completely forgotten in the wake of the game that came out just a week later and literally changed the world: id Software’s Doom. Doom forever changed the landscape of videogames. It codified an entire genre, appealed to people who’d never considered themselves gamers, ruined
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1992
Get psyched! It’s time for some profound carnage. My family got its hands on a reasonably powerful PC sometime in 1994; I’m not entirely sure how, given how much my mother already hated the Atari, Nintendo, and SNES. Maybe she convinced herself that the family would use it mostly for educational games and word-processing, and there’s at least some merit to that theory. See, in the old days games were significantly harder to find and purchase for the PC than they were for dedicated videogame consoles. A lot of them used the shareware model, where the first portion of the game
Special Report: One-Map WADstravaganza!
By now you’ve probably noticed that I lean more toward bigger WADs and megaWADs to talk about in this column. As a result, I have a growing list of one-map WADs I’ve either enjoyed or been meaning to play that has just been getting longer and longer for years now… You know what the means! That’s right — it’s time for another special episode! Welcome to the One-Map WADstravaganza: eight single-level releases from the last five years or so. Let’s jump right to it, before I get wrapped up in some long, masturbatory introduction! Presented in alphabetical order: Big Woodchip