Here we go, the final installment of the Top 10 games of ALL TIME. Lets see how we do here.
Before I give you the #1 game of all time, lets do a quick recap of #10-2.
10.) Everquest
9.) Age of Empires 2
8.) Tetris
7.) Legend of Zelda
6.) Starcraft
5.) Diablo
4.) Quake
3.) Warcraft 2
2.) Half-life
And now...you #1 game of all time
1.) DOOM
In 1992, a small Texas-based developer called id created a game that redefined gamers' notions of PC action games. It offered smooth-scaling VGA graphics, a ray-casting graphics engine, high-speed texture mapping, hundreds of Nazi soldiers, and the big guns needed to take them out. It was Wolfenstein 3-D, and it was great. However, the best was yet to come. The following year, id Software blew away gamers across the world with the release of their latest project, Doom. Literally overnight, Wolfenstein (and the vast majority of other 3D games, for that matter) became obsolete. Doom was nothing short of a revolution.
The first thing that struck one was the amazing atmosphere. The game started on an abandoned moonbase, and the ambience created by the graphics, sound, and lighting was a palpable thing. You actually felt you were exploring a (no pun intended) doomed space outpost, with only your gun and a handful of shells between salvation and oblivion. In fact, in its best moments Doom was so immersive as to be terrifying. Doom was one of the first games to feature semi-realistic lighting, and the designers took full advantage of this fact to scare the crap out of you. Doom made lighting an essential element of 3D action games.
It then follows that the graphics were spectacular. Doom featured something its predecessor lacked: a realistic-looking simulation of height. While Wolfenstein had 3D hallways and smooth movement, it lacked the crucial Z axis -- the vertical element that today's 3D engines take for granted. Doom suffered no such limitation, featuring stairs, pillars, elevators, plateaus, pits, and cliffs, in abundance. It also supported non-orthogonal walls, meaning that walls could connect at just about any angle, which allowed for much more freedom when creating level layouts.
Audio was yet another area in which Doom excelled. Each and every monster had a full assortment of impressive sounding groans, screams, and roars, each of which was an instant indication that you were in some deep **** The quality of these sounds was incredibile. To this day there has not been a monster with as distinctive a grunt as Doom's common Imp, or as intimidating a sound as the Cyberdemon's clopping hooves. The weapons sounded great as well, from the click-click-BOOM of the shotgun to the merciless droning of the infamous chainsaw. Further, Doom featured full stereo separation, so sounds could be pinpointed as coming from the left or right. Thus, audio cues became an integral part of the gameplay, giving players tactical information that their eyes could not.
Control was superb as well. In fact, I consider Doom to have the best control of any first person shooter yet made. The game responded to your inputs seemingly instantaneously, giving a feeling of ultra-precise control that is missing in many newer games. Doom was also the first to offer the standard mouse+keyboard setup, which is now considered essential for high-level FPS play. Playing with the mouse was a real joy. By editing the config file, savvy players could crank up the mouse sensitivity beyond what the game normally allowed. This made for instant 180s and amazingly precise "flicks", all produced with only the slightest twitch of the wrist. Of course, less advanced players were accomodated as well, with full support for keyboards and gamepads. The key is that Doom never limited the player with too-basic or poorly-conceived control schemes. Instead, its controls became deeper as the player increased in skill, always giving them just a bit more room to grow to achieve total mastery.
Oh, and y'know that newfangled Deathmatch thing? Well, Doom started that, too. Suffice to say it was a freakin' epiphany.
However, all of the aforementioned stuff is just fluffy detail, and not the essence of the game. When you get right down to it, Doom was about just one thing: pure, unbridled action. It was like being dropped into the middle of a raging war, with hordes of enemies on all sides and precious little ammunition to fend them off. It was You versus Them in a vicious contest of survival, and that is ultimately what made Doom so compelling. No game before (save perhaps Robotron) and few games since have offered the chance to take part in such a pure, simple contest.
It's a testament to Doom's superior design and longetivity that it still has a thriving community today, building modifications, maps, and utilities as if it were 1994. What's more, since id Software released the game's source code a few years back, a number of "source ports" have appeared, which extend the game's features and capabilities into the 21st century. There are versions of Doom that play over the Internet, replace the sprites with 3D models, and even offer OpenGL graphics support. These source ports have revitalized the Doom scene yet again, allowing for ever more creative maps and episodes. As a result, there's never been a better time to be a Doomer. Whether you're a battle-hardened Doom vet or a child of Unreal Tournament, you could do a lot worse than downloading the shareware episode, and exploring the doomed Phobos moon base one more time.
rock on!
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