I've been thoroughly enjoying going back to my gaming roots recently, with the remasters of Doom, Dark Forces, and Doom 64 on the Xbox!
The first screenshot here is the original Doom, which we got a demo of with our Power Macintosh 6200 in 1995, and my parents very much disapproved of the amount of gore in it. We also got the demo of Dark Forces on that same demo disc, which was just the first level, but I was so keen to get the full game that I begged my parents and promised I'd even delete Doom and not play it anymore if they got me the full game for Christmas. 😛
The second screenshot is very early on in the second level of Dark Forces, in all its software-rendered pixellated glory, and I can still remember sitting in my pyjamas on Christmas morning playing it with a sense of awe at all the new levels for me to explore. I think my favourite level was later in the game, Nar Shaddaa, the sheer vertical scale of it really grabbed my imagination.
And then lastly we have Doom 64, bought a handful of years after Dark Forces, and because it was on the Nintendo 64 and everything was 3D now, everything also had to have coloured lighting everywhere. It's hilarious how overdone it was looking back at it now, sort of like looking back at the pinstripes in early Mac OS X. Games now have lighting that makes sense contextually, you don't really notice it that much because it's realistic, but this was all "GONNA BE RED, LET'S HAVE SOME BLUE HERE, AND SOME GREEN THERE." 😂
And man, playing these I'd forgotten about the total lack of any sort of hand-holding you got when trying to figure out where you needed to go. There was an overhead map but absolutely none of these objective markers or UI indicators of direction. If you get lost, tough shit, you're going to have to wander until you figure it out!
Posted on 19 August 2025, 21:54