Doomed

The previous post was made while I was sorting some books today. I didn't do a whole lot of sorting, I figure one or two boxes a day is good enough. But after making that post, I got to wondering: will Doom II run on XP? I had recently discovered my old install CD of that game while unpacking, so I installed it.

It didn't work well, but a quick search turned up ZDoom, which solved the problem. Apparently there's still quite a fanbase of Doomers out there having fun with, and some discovering for the first time, the old games.

I still feel crippled without the special mini-joystick style mouse I used to have which made it so much easier for me to shoot while running. Heh. I still remember the first time I encountered the Cyberdemon in Doom (the first), which nearly made me soil my undies. It also occurred to me that the stereo I recently hooked up to the computer for playing mp3s is the stereo that I originally purchased with the intention of dramatically improving the sound quality of Doom. I'll have to hunt down a Cyberdemon and see what that WHAAAAAAAAAA!!! sounds like now.

Heh again. I was once playing one of those player-made wads and suddenly came face to face with a Cyberdemon. I immediately turned and ran for it. Several seconds went by when I realized I hadn't heard the tale-tell attack scream. So I went back, with extreme caution, and peeked around the corner again. The joker who had created this wad had created a new wall patch with a picture of a Cyberdemon on it. Only a picture. Ha ha. It nearly gave me a heart attack, but of course I laughed about it later. Sure I did.

I created two wads myself. One was called All In A Day's Work (dayswork.wad) and was loosely based on my place of employment at that time. The other was called Golgotha: Hill of Skulls (golgotha.wad). FYI, there's another golgotha.wad out there that I did not do. I thought I came up with a pretty original trick for this one. I put those floating things that vomit Lost Souls inside tiny rooms that would allow them to vomit the flaming skulls but would not allow them to escape and freely float around. The tiny rooms were very high up in towers, so that one had to climb a ziggurat before being able to shoot at them. This meant there was a constant supply of new Lost Souls coming at you until you were finally able to kill all those floating things (what were they called again? I forget).

The emails I received about them were all complimentary, and it was a lot of fun. One guy said the only problem he had with Golgotha was that it would make a great deathmatch wad but I hadn't put deathmatch starts in it. I never played deathmatch, so hadn't thought about it. So I put out a new version that included deathmatch starts.

But then my daughter was born, and that was the end of that.