Doom 64 - My Doom Can Beat Your Doom!

[ThornBrain]

Despite Doom's massive success and being ported to every system imaginable, the Nintendo 64 did not receive a port. It instead got a Doom of its very own, with all new sprites and a flashier engine. And now it's been ported to modern consoles for everyone to enjoy. It's Doom 64!

The LP:
JigglyJacob takes the reins for another All Secrets run, with myself (ThornBrain) and TorpidTypist on co-commentary.

Content Warning: Guns and gibs

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Fanart

(By crthemighty)


(by mateo360)

[azren]

I saw the lp of this on the archive, but I had forgotten how pretty the game actually is.

[mateo360]

Hi, yes. All the crushers inspired something stupid

[JamieTheD]

God-dammit, Mateo... It's pretty interesting to see these sprites, and it's interesting to see the evolution of the creature designs between various games. It's also amusing to see this mix of better visuals combined with earlier design, dick moves, faceplanting for secrets, and all.

[Mopey Dick]

Doom 64 definitely can do colored lighting; in fact, Doom PSX was capable of it as well, albeit in an extremely limited fashion.
This is such a weird game. They tried to lean into the horror trappings of Doom (and yes, the comparisons to Doom 3 are very apt) as opposed to RIP AND TEAR and it honestly didn't feel too fun to play to me but the atmosphere is top-notch.

[Carpator Diei]

It's fascinating how two games with the same general gameplay, same weapons and mostly same enemy roster can have such wildly different moods just through art direction and sound design.

[Blastinus]

I could see the double chainsaw maybe working out if you needed to cut Martian logs to a regulation length? Like, all Martian fireplaces are only so wide and so you can't cut them too long or they won't fit. Something like that.

[ThornBrain]

Time for a new weapon, awful flashing lights, and Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog discussion no one needs.

[mateo360]

It almost looks like the got their Pain Elemental and Cacodeamon sprites mixed up

[ThornBrain]

Hands up if your reference pools are ill-suited to a millennial Let's Play audience.

[azren]

"Look, if there's anything anime has taught me, it's the bigger the eyes, the cuter they are."



Adorable!

[Metroid26]

The reason you couldn't press the "button" is that it was actually a camera. One of the screens you look at shows you that room from its perspective. The other camera has the same texture, but it's right up against the ceiling so it's harder to see.

[Carpator Diei]

The second episode of BTSX has now also been added to Bethesda's Doom port; the WAD got an update for that occasion.
It's from after the release of the first episode, but this interview with Sarah Mancuso, the project leader on the BTSX series, is really interesting; it offers quite a few details on the actual process of Doom WAD-making. Also topical:

The original spark of inspiration for BTSX was The Darkening E2, an older vanilla-compatible DOOM mapset with original textures inspired by Quake 2. DOOM 64 was also an early influence.

[theenglishman]

Hands up if your reference pools are ill-suited to a millennial Let's Play audience.

*Sadly raises hand*

[ThornBrain]

Hell time!

[JamieTheD]

Iechyd dda, ffrindiau, a croeso i fagddu!

Mae heeeen wlad fyn haadaau yn annwl iiii fiii!

You said a flemmy language, and I couldn't resist nominating the language of my homeland.

[azren]

Between a weaker seeming BFG and taking out the Super Shotgun's animation, this game's on thin ice.

[Carpator Diei]

I'm really kind of annoyed that the level 'Even Simpler' is, in fact, less simple than 'Dead Simple'.

[Commander Keene]

Mega Man Legends speedruns all run diagonally due to that same coding math error! Basically, your speed is set to 1 in every direction you're moving, instead of setting your speed to 0.5 in each direction when you're moving diagonally, so you move at double speed when you're moving in two directions at once.

[White Coke]

Iechyd dda, ffrindiau, a croeso i fagddu!

Mae heeeen wlad fyn haadaau yn annwl iiii fiii!

You said a flemmy language, and I couldn't resist nominating the language of my homeland.

Demons, like the Welsh, treat 'W' as a vowel.

[ThornBrain]

Today's episode comes with its own weirdly angry url: "EN9C_WADGFg"

[Carpator Diei]

It would've been so easy to improve that blue key switch-hunt in the last level. Just leave out the switch that lowers the other switch and have the latter switch (the one that activates the elevator) be visible from the start and marked as a blue-key switch. The player would almost automatically see it while exploring the initial area, so it would be immediately clear where to go after getting the blue key.
Though I get the impression that searching for tiny switches and then searching for the effects of these switches was considered a legitimate gameplay element in 90s FPS design. Some of the Build engine games have pretty egregious examples of that.

[ThornBrain]

[Carpator Diei]

There was at least one more new monster planned for Doom 64, the Hellhound. It probably didn't make it in due to cartridge space constraints. Kind of a shame, I would like to know what attacks it was intended to have. Brutal Doom 64 actually adds its own version of it to the game (using sprites from Blood), along with all the cut monsters except for the Arch-Vile; but that one is of course Brutal Doom, so yeah...

An earlier attempt to get Doom 64 to the PC, the Total Conversion for Doom II Doom 64: Absolution (spoilers for upcoming level names in that link), also added a few custom enemies, among them a Nightmare version of the Cacodemon that sounds hilariously evil:

The nightmare cacodemon is a more powerful form of cacodemon found only in the Doom 64 TC. They are bright red rather than brown, three times as fast as the normal cacodemon, and nearly twice as tough. Nightmare cacodemons fire three times every time they attack. Unlike the other nightmare demons, they are also more resilient to pain than their regular counterparts. This makes the chainsaw less effective against them. They have 700 health.

(For reference, a standard Caco has 400 health, a Mancubus has 600 and a Baron has 1000)

[KeiraWalker]

I mentioned it in the YouTube comments on Part 5, but a couple points worth mentioning about Dark Citadel.

1: The dart trap in the pillar room will take out all the Barons if you set it off while they're alive, saving you a shit-ton of ammo.
2: You can use the invincibility powerup Jacob didn't grab to get through the pillar room unscathed if you haul ass.

Edit: On the subject of total conversions, there is a newer one called Doom 64: Retribution that is remarkably accurate, and a good stand-in if you've got an OG copy of Doom II but don't want to buy the new PC port of Doom 64. It has the added bonus of SmoothDoom's weapon animations being integrated (and uh... actually having weapon animations).

Edit 2: UGH. Yes, Dark Entries can go fuck itself sideways. I hate that level with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.

[JamieTheD]

It does seem like an easy level to hate. So many awful fights in a row, and revenant rockets to boot? Argh! Still, the hellhound looks interesting, shame it wasn't in it. Not a shame, however, that the Nightmare Cacodemon didn't make the cut.

[Carpator Diei]

Edit: On the subject of total conversions, there is a newer one called Doom 64: Retribution that is remarkably accurate, and a good stand-in if you've got an OG copy of Doom II but don't want to buy the new PC port of Doom 64. It has the added bonus of SmoothDoom's weapon animations being integrated (and uh... actually having weapon animations).

Even for people who have the new port, Retribution might be worth a look; I'm pretty sure it has two bonus episodes with all the extra levels that the original Doom 64 TC added, most of them designed by Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal who also programmed the 2020 port and designed the Lost Levels episode. As far as I know there aren't many Doom 64 mapsets out there, so for anyone who wants more Doom 64 that's a good opportunity.

It does seem like an easy level to hate. So many awful fights in a row, and revenant rockets to boot? Argh! Still, the hellhound looks interesting, shame it wasn't in it. Not a shame, however, that the Nightmare Cacodemon didn't make the cut.

The Nightmare Cacodemon is a TC original, I believe. So blame modders

[AradoBalanga]

Whoever created the Nightmare Cacodemon definitely had Gundam on the mind, given the Char Aznable joke in its design (red color, 3x greater performance than normal Cacodemons). All it needs is a mask covering its face, and you've completed the joke.

[Carpator Diei]

Whoever created the Nightmare Cacodemon definitely had Gundam on the mind, given the Char Aznable joke in its design (red color, 3x greater performance than normal Cacodemons). All it needs is a mask covering its face, and you've completed the joke.

That's pretty hilarious, and now I'm imagining a Cacodemon-shaped mecha with a cockpit inside the eyeball.

Also, that "greater performance" stuff makes me wonder if Imps get collective inferiority complexes because Hell Knights are just them but better in every way.

[AradoBalanga]

That's pretty hilarious, and now I'm imagining a Cacodemon-shaped mecha with a cockpit inside the eyeball.

While not quite the same thing, the SD Gundam video games do let you pilot the franchise's adorable mascot, Haro. And its more evil version, Psyco Haro.

[ThornBrain]

It's about time that guy showed up. And that Jacob zapped him to bits.

[Carpator Diei]

Aside from some of the castle levels, this game's hell part seems to lean rather heavily into the abstract level design of Doom II, with some of the level names not even referring to places. That does raise some thematic problems; from Even Simpler onwards, it's just been seemingly random trips through hell in order to get to more hell. Probably shows that gameplay design was very much the primary concern here.

[Blastinus]

I dunno, this game's attempt to make a really surreal, otherworldly level for "Into the Void" actually looks really cool. Considering the ambient direction they went with the soundtrack, you could have definitely gone with more random and chaotic map designs and they wouldn't have seemed out of place.

[KeiraWalker]

It amuses me too much that the Pinky's death rattle is so out of sync with their death animation, you hear them hit the floor almost a full second after they've dropped.

Edit: You know, it feels like they nerfed the BFG 9,000 in order to make the Unmaker more awesome. Still, I like the look and sound of the Doom 64 BFG 9,000 better than the original one, if I'm being honest.

[ThornBrain]

Don't know how obvious it is that I had two espressos before this recording session.

[KeiraWalker]

Don't know how obvious it is that I had two espressos before this recording session.

Don't know that I would have guessed without you saying anything, but now I'm just imagining you, like, vibrating in your chair the entire time.

In regard to the game, I remember reading about the level Breakdown in particular because it was kind of a flex by Midway, being all "holy crow, look what we can pull off with the Doom engine!" There's a bit of it in prior levels, but this one is just full of room-over-room layouts and drastic alteration of the map as the level progresses--a particular example being that when you leave the room Jacob is in at about 6:30 in the video, the hallways outside it have flipped around and it's no longer possible to backtrack to the beginning of the map. The room upstairs from that point (from about 7:00-8:00 in the video) crosses over the hallway leading out of the beginning area twice, as well.

The amusing thing is, as I understand it, the basis of all that is a bug with raising and lowering floors that fan maps started exploiting to make bridges and stuff, not too long before Doom 64 was released. I am honestly not sure if it's convergent evolution or if the people at Midway borrowed a trick or two from fan WADs.

Edit: On the subject of motion sickness, Jacob and Torp reminded me, when I first started playing Doom 64, something about the slightly different perspective and field of view compared to Doom and Doom II caused it to give me terrible motion sickness, unless I sat back like six feet from my monitor. It was really freaking weird, considering I'm not prone to motion sickness otherwise. Eventually I figured out I could increase the FOV and that made it go away. Still, what the heck.

[Carpator Diei]

In regard to the game, I remember reading about the level Breakdown in particular because it was kind of a flex by Midway, being all "holy crow, look what we can pull off with the Doom engine!"

Well they're in good company there, that was pretty much the entire theme of Doom 1's first episode

[ThornBrain]

Wrapping up the main story with a brand new boss! Who knows where we go from here after this. Mostly because Jacob hasn't sent us those videos yet.

[Carpator Diei]

It's kind of hilarious how much having all the Demon Keys trivializes the final boss. Though it doesn't look like it would be a particularly fun bossfight without them.

[ThornBrain]

About time this game got fun
Jacob beat me to it