Favorite Video Games: Doom/Doom 2 (PC) 1993 and 1994

Am I the only one that feels like sweet box art died out with landlines and VHS tapes?

Doom and Doom 2 were probably my hands-down favorite videogames from the time I acquired them in the 5^th grade or so to my first year of college.  Technically I would say that Doom2 was my real favorite, but if I did’t mention Doom I couldn’t to talk about the games’ historical significance, cultural impact, etc.  Anyway, I got both games around the same time, and aside from a few minor details they’re pretty much the same game.  So I now present to you the first DOUBLE VIDEO GAME REVIEW!  That’s just one review about two games (kinda.)

Doom (PC) 1993/Doom II (PC) 1994

If only real life was as easy as a videogame.

Aside from being one of my favorite games you can make a pretty strong argument that Doom was the most influential first-person-shooter of all time.  In fact up until around 1997 first person shooters were typically called “Doom Clones.”  The term was pretty accurate too, most of the “Doom Clones” coming out around the time were just “Doom in the Old West,” “Star Wars Doom,” or simply “Doom on a different space station than the one in Doom.”  This is partially due to the fact that many of those games actually licensed Doom’s engine, and partially due to the fact that to this day most game designers are fucking hacks.

"Gloom" not not be confused with "Boom," or "Loom: A Weaver's Tale"

Doom is essentially a refinement of the “shoot monsters/find keys/ find exit” formula established in Wolfenstein 3D.  Doom replaced Nazis with demons, and instead of a knife you get a fucking chainsaw.  In Doom you could also go upstairs and downstairs, which may not sound that exciting to all but the most dedicated of Slinky enthusiasts; however adding the ability to move up and down as well as side to side, not to mention varying light levels, non-perpendicular walls and stereo sound allowed the designers build levels that were way more interesting and complex than those seen in the likes of Blakestone 3D.  Speaking of complex, how about that movie Inception?  Why was Lo Pan living in that dude’s brain?  Talk about confusing.

Maybe he was looking for a girl with green eyes?

The graphics were pretty fucking awesome too.  It seems quaint now, but I can still remember looking out the window in the first level (E1M1) at the mountains.  I had never seen graphics like that in a videogame before.  It looked (kinda) like (pixilated) real life mountains.  The graphics may be outdated, but I think they hold up pretty well.  They certainly look better than early polygon based graphics from the mid to late 90’s.  Talk about shitty.  I know it “was the future of gaming,” but we didn’t live in the future in 1997.  Now that we do, we can all agree that women’s breasts look better when they’re not jagged and pointy, like a bunch of glass triangles smashed into a boob shape.

These boobs on the other hand, look great. At least they would if she'd just move her fucking hand.

One of Doom’s best features is probably the one that left the biggest impression on the FPS genre: the deathmatch.  Doom was the first FPS that allowed players to go head to head and try to kill each other.  It was awesome, because killing people is awesome.  I used to stay up all night playing Doom LAN games with my cousins.  (Personally, I preferred using the desktop to the laptop, because it had better controls; although it was much easier to screen look with the laptop.)  Doom deathmatch was so popular at the time that companies even wrote programs like “antidoom” to shut down games on company servers.  Today deathmatch is easily a bigger part of the FPS genre than the single player campaigns.  I think it’s safe to say that 14-year-olds wouldn’t be able to hurl homophobic slurs at each other while playing video games across the world wide internets if Doom hadn’t paved the way almost 20 years earlier.

Cutting edge

Computer piracy is a crime (a sexy crime!)

And there it is the exact moment in my video game review where I start to feel really fucking old.  If you want to play Doom or Doom 2, both can be found relatively easy if you’re willing to resort to piracy (Arr!)  If you manage to get the game or already have it lying around somewhere ZDoom is an excellent front-end program that adds extra features like mouselook, and more importantly ZDoom allows Doom and Doom 2 to be played on a modern PC.  Both Dooms are also available in the recent Doom3 re-release and in the X-Box marketplace, although only the downloadable version for the 360 offers internet deathmatch support.  Just don’t play a bunch of Doom and shoot up your high school.  I know it seems obvious, but I wouldn’t have said anything about it if it hadn’t come up before.  Too soon?   

"This game's so fun I'm going to shoot up my school...?"  Hard to believe people were that sick before the internet

The programmers for Doom were inspired by Evil Dead II and Aliens.

Top 10 Video Game Movies: Part II

The long awaited sequel to my Top 10 Video Game Movies Part I.  Sorry about that, I've been working like crazy lately.

5. Streetfighter

Kylie Minogue, star of Streetfighter the Movie and many impure thoughts

I can still remember going to the movies to see Streetfighter and melting Starbursts on the theater’s floodlights while I waited for my mom to pick me up.  Streetfighter came out in 1994 which made me 11 years old, their target demographic: old enough to love violent action movies but too young to see rated R movies.  The fact that I saw this movie twice in the theater is all the move impressive considering I made like $5 a week at the time.  Years later I saw this movie for $5 on DVD and bought it for my future wife as part of her birthday present, she was less than thrilled.  Streetfighter is about Raul Julia trying to take over the world, leading a mercenary army of stupid henchmen.  The only man that thwart these dark designs is, you guessed it: Jean-Claude Van Damme.  Jean-Claude plays Guile: an American soldier with an American flag tattoo, and Jean-Claude speaks English like old people fuck.  It’s kind of a stretch.  The rest of the characters are taken from the 30 or so iterations of Street Fighter II, even Cammy (played by Kyle Minogue in some awesome short shorts) has a fairly sizable role.  My only real beef with the movie, once you get past all the stupid implausible parts was Blanka.  Blanka was always my favorite character; with his green skin, electricity, and ability to bite someone’s fucking face.  Blanka spends the entirety of Streetfighter watching a different movie on some VR goggles, which were all the rage at the time.  He doesn’t bite nary a face or even bust a bunch of barrels.  Lame.

Defender of world peace or as Guile would say, "whirl-ed piss."

4. Doom  

Second best actor from the WWF after Rowdy Roddy Piper

Why don’t they port Doom to the PSN and X-Box Live?  I don’t think it would be hard to do and I would totally buy it.  This has nothing to do with the movie, but goddamn I love that game.  I guess that’s part of the reason Doom the movie is so high on the list.  They do make some drastic and unnecessary changes to the plot of the game.  In the game, humans discover warp pads on one of the moons of Mars.  As humans experiment on these pads they accidentally open a gateway to hell.  A lone Space Marine must fight Cacodemons and save Earth.  The movie added a bunch of scientific gobblity gook in an attempt to make a sophisticated horror/action/sci-fi movie like Aliens.  They should have just stuck to the original plot (dudes killing hell monsters) and made a sweet straightforward action movie like Predator.  It was still a pretty sweet movie.

My favorite part of the movie

3.  Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

Different movie same idea

I decided when I started this list that I would include only one movie per franchise, lest the list fill up with Resident Evil movies.  Cradle of Life is better that the original Tomb Raider for a myriad of reasons.  The first of which being that Angelina Jolie doesn’t stuff her bra in this one.  I have no problem with actresses getting fake tits, but a padded bra?  How old are we? (Personally I haven’t stuffed my bra in years.) The first Tomb Raider movie included Lara Croft building and fighting robots in her own house for no goddamned reason while listening to one of U2’s worst songs.  Taking that into consideration the second movie still manages to be ten times sillier and therefore better.  Consider the part when Lara Croft gets trapped fathoms deep under the sea with no oxygen tank.  She does the only logical thing: cuts her hand to attract a CGI shark, punch said shark in the face and grab on to its dorsal fin as it races to the surface for some reason.  She doesn’t get the bends or anything.  Plot wise it’s pretty similar to the first movie; Jon Voight’s daughter must jet set around the globe with her huge boobies to find a magical treasure.  Shit writes itself.  Watch out for snakes.

If you don't want to see the movie after looking at this promo pic I guess I should mention that Gerrard Butler is also in the movie, because you probably aren't into the ladies.

2. Resident Evil

"Exactly what it looks like."

I describe this movie as “exactly what it looks like.”  Most people say to this, “well I think it looks stupid.”  You know what?  You’re stupid.  To me Resident Evil looks like a movie about a supermodel killing zombies, and I was not disappointed.  I never played any of the games, so I have no idea how close the movie follows the source material.  The plot was kind of convoluted and goofy, and Resident Evil is a Japanese game to it might be very similar.  On the other hand, there are no schoolgirls getting tortured to death by perverted old men so it might have nothing to do with its Japanese roots.  I had a tough time deciding which Resident Evil movie to put on this list.  In the end I decided to pick the one where Milla Jovovich shows her lady parts.  I’ve had a huge thing for her since I saw the Fifth Element in the theater at the age of 14, so I was able to get past her hospital gown and shaved head and concentrate on her nakedness.  That kind of mentality is what separates men and women, and separates Resident Evil from the other movies in the series.

This was the closest I ever came to buying a copy of Maxim

1. The Last Starfighter

The game that never was

I realize this movie wasn’t actually based on a video game, but it should have been.  The movie was practically a commercial for “The Last Starfighter Videogame.”  The credits even promised a forthcoming game produced by Atari.  Sadly, it never came to pass.  If you’ve never seen the film it’s about a guy in a trailer park that gets the all time high score on a spaceship arcade game, but it turns out that aliens made the game to find someone that could be a really kickass starfighter pilot.  Every nerd’s gamer’s fantasy, right?  The characters were great, especially Robert Preston as the Centuari; the guy who invented the videogame as a get rich quick scheme.  Lance Guest was also good as both the protagonist Alex, and the protagonist’s robot decoy.  The dialog was pretty awesome too:

When I saw this as a kid I was like, “holy shit that was awesome.”  Rewatching this movie in my late 20’s I concur with my earlier sentiment.  The movie also features some early CGI, alien bounty hunters (Sweet!) and flying cars.  A really enjoyed this movie. 

I guess that’s a pretty good way to wrap this list up, with a movie that isn’t actually based on a videogame.  But what does it all mean?  I guess if this list proves anything it proves that there’s a serious lack of good movies based on videogames.  If this list proves anything else I guess it proves that I’m a sucker for hot babes.  I mean, House of the Dead?  That movie sucked.  Oh well, back to the shitty beer.

Goddamn you House of the Dead, and your sexy ladies!