User blog:EtherBot/Obligatory Introduction Post

If you were expecting me to just say "Hey hello it's me, I am also doom fan yes" than be prepared to get kinda bored by text rambling really fast. This is a post about all my thoughts on everything ever. Doom related of course.

Obligatory Introduction
My name is Ethan B. [REDACTED] and I am basically just objectively the worst person ever.

I like to draw, make short video games, write short horror stories over at the Creepypasta Wiki, read horror or adventure stories, play horror, adventure or action video games, watch horror, adventure, action and comedy movies and etc also. Etc is my personal favorite hobby now that I think about it.

I personally didn't play DOOM when it came out because I personally wasn't even a lone twinkle in my mothers eye then, I was born in 2001 and it was at that same time that the universe retaliated my presence with some kind of horrific accident some time in september(?) idk I never looked too much into that.

I actually, believe it or not, was brought unto DOOM via "Chex Quest" which is exactly what it sounds like if you've never heard of it, and I'm exactly as lame as I now sound like if you have heard of it. I had never heard of DOOM, I was never exposed to it, but I sure did play a lot of Chex Quest. And then there was "Chex Quest 3" on "ZDoom" and then I looked into whatever "ZDoom" was and it was a slippery slope from there.

And although Chex Quest still holds a weird special place in my heart, mostly for it's obscurity and the nostalgia, once I drunkenly stumbled into the harsh world of DOOM it was pretty hard to look back. I'm solid proof that you old farts are only pretty much mostly blinded by gross nostalgia and rose tinted glasses for DOOM. Even like whatever 20 years-ish from DOOM (I'm pretty sure it came out in 1993 but I don't want to look it up and I also don't want to do any math) it still kicks ass to a fresh pair of eyes who grew up on modern shooters like Halo and... uh "Blinx the Time Sweeper "

(Does Blinx count as a shooter?)

My Opinions on Things and Stuff and Doom 3
I have a particular fondness for strange and awful children's movies. I grew up watching things such as "The Sand Fairy " and "Voyage of the Unicorn " which are both masterpeices in their own rights. Unicorn has genuinely great set and costume design with a awful fantasy script a little girl would make up, and Sand Fairy has Yoda as a moldy prune green man in the sand who grants some overwhelmingly ugly british children their wishes for like three whole hours.

I often get the impression that I enjoy things for reasons other people don't enjoy them, or that I do enjoy things that other don't enjoy because I focus on different elements. Like Doom 3 has weird awful voice acting but, to me, that makes it way more engaging. It's like playing through a hammy b movie with actors all competing to chew the scenery the hardest and get the golden cheese prize. It's filled with these genuinely unnerving moments of terror (like the "follow me, over here!" "THEY TOOK MY BABY!!!" scene that serves no gameplay purpose other than to be weird and scary)  directly followed by like, that one asian guy voicing another obviously white guy, or listening to a pda tape with that one guy who voices half the pda people using a slightly different cadence. It lightens the suspense a little bit but it also helps establish a firm consitant world. This is a weird scary b movie world with people in labcoats accidentally unleashing hell on earth on mars in space!!!! It's an inheritly scary and an inheritly stupid premise so I personally thought it was a really smart move to cater to both extremes.

But I guess other people didn't focus on any of that, they were all "the guns sounds liike pop guns and there are too many monster closets" and I was like but it's more oppresive and monster closets were a staple in the original doom. And then they're all like "Yeah but DOOM isn't supposed to be oppressive it's supposed to be empowering" and I'm like "Yeah but the new DOOM is super empowering and that's why it stops being hard halfway through and doesn't have any atmosphere"

And DOOM 2016
That's not a hit on the new DOOM, the new DOOM is a riot of great fun! But it doesn't really have any punch ot it..it felt forgettable to me. Doom 3 always felt personal to me. It had that sort of spark of "This is the game that we want to make and if you think it sucks we don't care, because we think it's AWESOME" that you felt in the original DOOM. DOOM 2016 feels more corporate, it feels like every decision made in the game was made by dozens of people with their own ideas of what DOOM 2016 should be. I think it's a really clever fun game with a fantastic and elegantly designed campaign that makes every update it should and stays true to every firm staple it should. But it feels impersonal, less like a crazy sugar high game made by a group of likeminded assholes with their own idea of a great time on a pc, and more like a company said "Let's make a reboot" and then they made a really good reboot...just not really a game I'd put on my "favorite's list"

And Doom 2
Doom 3 is on my favorite's list so that's probably a weird opinion to put out there. Weird opinion number two: DOOM 2 is a poorly designed game. The city levels are weird and abstract and, although I know that's part of people fondess for DOOM's level design, they're so backwards and hard to navigate with random teleporters you have to remember individually and weird elevator sequences that instead of designing a flowing level, ID just plastered an arrow on the floor and called it a day. It's often pretty unfair as well, expecting you to know what your getting into before you actually get into it which is just weird and nonesense. Whereas Doom 1 felt concise and like it's level design had a point--Doom 2 feels overly experimental and like it was just kind of the developers throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. It doesn't feel like an abstract interpretation of a world like DOOM 1 does, more like a set of challenges and levels strung together with geometry that's even less believable than DOOM 1's. That being said, if I ever play DOOM Deathmatch or especially Co-op with a friend or sibling, I'll play DOOM 2 bar none. Bar mostly none. Bar like a 2 out of 10 I suppose. It's just more open and has that sort of "Let's jump straight back into the action right at the start" vibe with it's guns and enemy placements that makes it feel perfect for playing with a friend.

Other Stuff + How to Write Adaptations of Video Games
My other gaming interests include the Five Nights at Freddy's series which I'm of two minds on,and the Halo franchise which I've never written blog posts about or anything but still have opinions on.

I'm writting a DOOM Graphic Novel right now which I'll probably make a post about some day. I've already written a graphic novel based on "Adventure" for the Atari 2600 and in my experience doing both of these it's much much easier to write a compelling story when you're adapting a game with an intriguing PREMISE with very little PLOT as opposed to a game like Bioshock or Asassin's Creed with an extensive plot already in the games. Reason's being that video games are different than comic books or movies because they have the advantage of more time to fill with vignettes and such that are important to bring home the themes and unify the story to give it any punch, but they also are forced to have plots focused around some core gameplay mechanic which can be a shortcoming. Shooting people for a long time nonstop is fun to DO but watching a movie about it would be weird and boring. But with a simple premsie that was NOT expanded on for the game you're adapting you can take liberties to make sure your story is best suited for you're own special medium (movies or books or whatever) without having to worry about taking a plot-line already customized for a 20 hour videogame.

In other words, TL;DR, You can write a comic or movie about DOOM or ATARI ADVENTURE very easily because you just need a compelling plot about a guy shooting demons on mars or about an adventurer rescuing a magical chalice with lots of iconic imagery from the games and such. If I were to write about Bioshock I'd have to grapple with the pacing being inheritly different, the plasmids feeling like a weird unneeded addition to the story (in terms of the main character getting any superpowers, that'd feel like a strange decision to those who never played the games) Andrew Ryan being an antagonist with little on-screen presence, any expostion that was cleverly layed out in the scenery would need to be actually spoonfed to the audience taking up precious screen-time and ETC. You aren't writing an interesting story about an underwater liberal city, you have to actually translate the game's elaborate plot onto a 2 1/2 hour film which is bound for disaster.

TL;DR that either, video game's plots have creative liberty to do things movies can't do and they also have a lot more time to tell their stories. So the less specific details you have to grapple with when making your adaptation, the better.

In Conclusion
I'm a weirdo from Seattle who wrote a super long introduction post to Doom Wiki without once talking about "WADS" or about anything other than main series games and games from other franchises. Oh btw I have a soft spot for DOOM 64 and I think the Master Levels is the best version of DOOM 2. Peace out.