DOOM is one of my all-time favourite games. I fell in love with it immediately when I played the shareware version all those years ago — though I never convinced my parents to get me a Registered version — and, over the years, I reckon it is one of the games I have come back to more times than any other.
As you can probably imagine, it is an enormous thrill and an immensely satisfying career moment to have been part of an official DOOM release — in this case, the Evercade version, for which I put together the text for the manual (paying homage to the original version's documentation), the digital descriptions (the stuff you see on the Evercade menu) and worked as part of the dev team, testing out various features and providing feedback.
We were working on this for so long, along with Banjo-Kazooie, that it felt like we'd never be able to just settle down and enjoy the fruits of our labours. But finally, I have my copy of The DOOM Collection for Evercade, along with three Evercade Nexus handhelds (plus all the myriad other Evercades I already have) and I can, at last, sit back and… well, play DOOM again.
It will probably not surprise you to hear that DOOM still holds up very well. I am currently in the middle of playing through on the Ultra-Violence difficulty level, which, I must confess to my shame, is actually a relatively new experience to me; traditionally I have stuck to Hurt Me Plenty and still find some parts pretty challenging. However, I've been really enjoying playing on Ultra-Violence; it really does ramp up the action and make things even more exciting, and it kind of feels like a brand new experience, even though I'm just going through familiar levels for the umpteenth time.
That said, there's still a fair old chunk of DOOM that I either haven't played or am just less familiar with. I've only played DOOM II through once in my life, for example, and I've never played the two parts of Final DOOM. I do have it in my head that DOOM II and everything that came after is significantly harder than base game DOOM — and I'm probably right about that — but I have successfully beaten No Rest for the Living and SIGIL in the not-too-distant past, so it's not as if I'm incapable of meeting these greater challenges. So I'm going to work my way through and enjoy every moment of this wonderful version of DOOM we've put together.
And this isn't the end of it, either; we have some really interesting plans for what we can continue to do with DOOM, which will likely show up at some point next year. We have a lot of other work to do first, though, so in the meantime I'm going to kick back on the sofa, grab my new Evercade wireless controller and once again indulge in one of my all-time favourite games — one I don't think I will ever tire of.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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