Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20170225142933/@comment-3547390-20170424184339

Honestly it is quite amazing when you think I have covered over 225 levels, not including all the modified missions, for a game I am not that big of a fan of. Doom is better than most sprite games, but the problem is that its limitations get too much in my way. There are too many broken PWADs, Secrets are a funky thing where even the editor might not reveal anything, and because I cannot stand the base game I end up with all these compatibility issues. I don't have to feel like I am cheating in Quake as I am playing in a heavily vanilla environment. I pretty much am as purist with Quake as others are with Doom, but find Doom's limitations to be its downfall. Source ports change things, that is the problem with every game, and it is why I rip on NewDark being the main method of distribution for Thief these days. Doom has more mods than most other games out there, so it is no surprise more compatibility issues exist than any other game. Quake is pretty amazing, you can play GLQuake and be confident everything will work as well as in 1.01 from what I have seen. Thief is a bit more shaky, but the number with compatibility issues can be counted on one hand. Doom just had the bad luck of changing a lot during its run, plus lacking features later games had. In 1993, I probably would not mind playing Doom a bunch as that is all I had. I will keep that in mind if I ever time travel. But, with the expanse of games we have, it just falls on its face and its flaws become all the more apparent.

I understand the appeal of older versions, I am a game historian at heart. The main reason I think I did Doom for so long was because I wished to catalog the early months that have been so carelessly neglected by others, many often ignore the early levels or subpar missions, so I like to log them. Doom has had some nice preservation of its files, especially since it has a lot of shovelware CDs and sites that store files. Comparing this to Quake, the shovelware packs seem to need to use their own textures, so we end up not really getting the same we would get online. Quake also revolves a lot around following long dead links. We found levels most people wouldn't even know were tied to Laura Beyer's Doom. We found Invasion, which was quite polished for its time of release. I guess my main gripe is that I am not really the person to do it, I have no real desire to use the original versions of the game and thus we don't get it as well as we could. For another game I would rip my hair out and do a lot of work, but for Doom I just feel apathetic to a lot. I am quite aware of DEHACKED, which I have heard doesn't really work with GZDoom, so even getting past the early 90s we would find a lot of compatibility issues until we hit the era of GZDoom. I have even heard GZDoom is shaky with its compatibility between versions.

It should be no surprise that Doom did serve as a test of sorts. I basically was figuring out how I would catalog stuff for Quake and other games going forward. I think I am ready to tackle more Quake levels, finishing up the commercial add-ons and actually getting to whatever files I can dig out on the internet. Expect a similar pattern when we get to internet released levels (aka levels not modified by these add-ons to use their own textures). As you have seen, I am quite committed with Quake to playing it in a DOS 1.06 version, even though the differences are pretty minimal (except for the extra challenges, such as the inability to save and Spawns somehow being able to kill you in one hit). So I fully understand seeing it how it was back then, I have that obsession and it is why I try to keep things as vanilla as possible, and where my rules for vanilla come from (such as why I accept DirectDraw wrappers, they don't affect the actual game experience).

As I said in the beginning, I understand compatibility of old versions. I have pretty much been one of the only people against Thief's recent patches, everyone else uses them. NewDark messes up quite a few missions. For Thief (as well as Quake, if you haven't noticed I showed off every public version released in 1996, though just like you don't need to care about Doom 1.1 when doing custom levels, the early versions of Quake are pretty much like that) I have all versions of the games on hand just so I can play it with the compatibility needed, kinda like what you do for Doom. Unreal is the only of the big three I don't really do it like that, mainly because patches are so poorly documented it becomes quite chaotic to hunt things down.

So, yeah, I totally get the mindset you have for Doom. It just is that I cannot find vanilla Doom bearable. Today I tested out version 1.2 a bit. It was pretty easy to pick up keyboard controls, it seemed quite playable, but I just found it much less enjoyable. I felt like I was compressed, on rails or a trolley, and thus was unable to actually look around the rooms I am in like I would like to. Plus the counters not being displayed quickly gets annoying, plus I loathe the lack of a console. It just wasn't fun.

EDIT: I decided to try some DOS Doom, at least get some footage for it. If you were curious how much I bumble with a keyboard, now you get to see it :P