It's time to take you guys back. It's the early 90's, game consoles are still the Kings of Gaming, and computers are just finding their ways into the homes of Mr. Average American. PC games exist, but they have yet to reach a fever pitch yet. Then, in 1992, a game called Wolfenstein 3D is released by a company called id Software. This isn't their first game, or first popular game either, as they also made the Commander Keen games as well. However, id made their name with Wolfenstein 3D. It was one of the first First Person Shooter games to become very popular, and it set many standards for the series that most FPS games use to this date. Such as a disembodied hand holding a gun/weapon, huge labyrinth like levels with a single exit, and hordes of enemies standing in your way that your bullets can't wait to rip to shreds. However, they would soon refine the genre, as well as how games are distributed, with the release of the next game series in 1993, Doom. I remember being very young when playing Doom, and the first time I played it was in a computer store at one of the demonstration computers. As such, I didn't get to play much, but what I did play was fun and satisfying. I mean, seriously, who doesn't love a game where the story hardly matters and you just go around shooting the **** out of demons? That's essentially all Doom is at its core, and that's one of it's aspects that makes it great. The graphics for the time were pretty good. The 2.5D effects looked much better than they did in Wolfenstein, and everything was dark, futuristic, and eventually demonic. The atmosphere was definitely something else, and with the likes of Mortal Kombat which was released a year earlier, was very controversial. It is important to note that Doom popularized a type of software known as Shareware. Shareware is a type of Game Demo, but instead of giving you one level to play around in to get a feel for the game, you were generally given an entire episode, roughly an equivalent of 25~33% of the actual game. If you so chose you could pay a price to register the game and get the rest of the levels, but otherwise Shareware was generally completely free. This was an essential step in the evolution of Digital Distribution, which is on the rise today. Also, Doom began the tradition of FPS Deathmatches with your friends. You could play over a modem, or a TCP/IP connection. This increased the longevity of the game 10 fold, and made the game banned in many offices, as all the multiplayer matches would clog the systems. But that was then...what about today? Why would we play this classic now? Well, I can tell you that some people will frown upon this game. It has aged to a certain degree. For example, as it was such an early FPS, you can't even look up or down. If there's an enemy on the Y-Axis, the game will automatically move the bullets up or down. Also, the graphics are a little stale by today's standards. The monsters are all 2-dimensional sprites drawn from different angles, and that sometimes makes it tough to gauge how far away certain enemies are. Regardless of these two points however, this game is still ridiculously fun. While modern FPS games look better and control a little more realistically, Doom gives you the feeling of just being a Bad Ass Mother****** Marine. You run fast, you have big guns that only @&)%#*$ need to aim up and down, and you do all of this to AWESOME music. It's SO satisfying to just run around a level, blasting all the enemies to nothing but a bloody pulp, something that modern FPSs don't have enough of. Too much story in some of them. I'd rather just shoot things sometimes! No objectives, no flags, just enemies and an exit. That's what Doom's all about. If you have an Xbox 360, then this is on the Xbox Live Arcade, with the Multiplayer functionality as well. It should be a DEFINITE download. It's a classic, and helped get FPS games to the popularity level that they are at today. It is indeed a little dated, but the aspects that are dated are easy to overlook. No matter what, you'll have fun with this game. This classic? We ****in' Love it! (NOTE/joke: I don't normally use this type of language in all my blogs. I use it in this one because I'm talking about ******* Doom. Anyone who doesn't like this game, doesn't have testicles. At least, that's my opinion.)