Doom (2016)

Doom (2016)

What more is there to say about Doom? It’s Doom. That’s about it; it set the standard for what a first-person shooter should be, and it’s been doing that ever since. The ID Tech 6 engine is just freaking amazing, and it all runs without any failures at all on my Linux box, which is something of a miracle.

I should say up front that I really loved Doom 3, which is apparently considered “not very Doom.” In Doom 3, there’s a lot more story; you’re walking through a well-realized world with dozens of voices found on every data slate you pick up, furthering the tale of a mad scientist who discovers a portal to Hell and makes a deal with the denizens there. It had lots of different settings and a few nice puzzles to solve, but was mostly jump-scares and boss battles.

The people at ID didn’t think that was very Doom. Doom 3 was an adventure with guns; this latest Doom is basically a first-person twin-stick.

Twin-sticks are among my favorite genre of video game. The original twin-stick game is Robotron: 2084, which first came out in 1982. You had two controls: one for direction of motion, the other for direction of fire. There’ve been a lot of twin-sticks since then: from Atari’s shameless and rushed-to-market rip-off, Black Widow, to modern retellings like Geometry Wars, Tesla vs. Lovecraft, and Nex Machina, the last of which was written with help by the guy who wrote the original Robotron. (All of those, by the way, also run great on Linux.)

And Doom is a twin stick. Every level is basically six or seven “arenas,” large spaces, often marked with a “gore nest,” where you fight off one or two massive waves of murderous hellbeasts, collect whatever loot was dropped, and move on to the next arena. There are few jump scares and fewer puzzles.

It’s much more arcade than it is story. The story is thin tissue, just enough to justify the landscapes of Mars, the cramped and dangerous interiors of the Mars base, and the painful bleakness of Hell, and is accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek collection of set pieces where you discover the UAC knew all along that it was engaged with “real magic,” but it was a kind they could technologize, as long as it didn’t get out of control.

And the graphics simply are gorgeous. Doom really does push the envelope for so many frames per second of incredible artwork, all in the service of this very silly shoot-em-up. You can see the amount of effort that went into every pixel.

But all of that is just dressing on the arcade action, the sweet dopamine addiction of random number generators vs. the reflexes you’ve got.

For some people, "gentle mockery" still hurts

There’s a line in this product review that brings up one of my sorest sore points. After her husband admits he’s getting older and needs more support, he buys a lumbar support cushion. The author writes,

I spent the next three years of our relationship calling it his ‘butt pillow’ (‘Here, you left your butt pillow on the passenger seat’) and ragging him about it mercilessly. In my defense, I’d never seen such a thing before.

Before he was effectively kicked off YouTube for his viciously anti-Muslim and anti-gay rhetoric, Dennis Prager had up a video in which he talked about marriages and declared “healthy marriages are one in which each person can rib the other without heat.”

I’m glad neurotypicals can talk that way about each other. Over here, in not-so-neuro-typical land, “ribbing” and “ragging” are basically ways that someone entertains him or herself at the expense of a supposed loved one. These things just hurt, and it doesn’t take a Buddha or Jesus to know that if you find yourself hurting your loved ones on a regular basis maybe you should just stop.

Life is hard. In a long-term relationship, ribbing is saying, over and over, “There’s something about you I either don’t understand or I don’t like,” and maybe if you find yourself in that position your should try to understand, or try to negotiate what it is you don’t like. Constant ribbing is a form of rejection, and for those of us not so secure, confident, and arrogant as to feel like we can handle anything, rejection just hurts.