Brutal Doom (if you don't like Doom, then move along, nothing to see here!)

edited January 2014 in Chit chat
For any fans of the ancient (but still great) PC game Doom, have you tried Brutal Doom (http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom)? Unlike most Doom mods it's neither a set of new levels, not a new Doom engine, instead it alters the gameplay, not enough to lose the Doom 'feel', but enough to make it feel like a modernised (in a good way) version of Doom.

The weapons have been altered, some of the enemy AI, movement, and attacks have been altered, you can now aim vertically, headshots now do more damage than body shots, some non-human enemies drop weapons when they die, which you can pick up and use, you can reload weapons, you gain health from killing powerful enemies, and lots more nice touches. Be warned though, there's tonnes of blood.

Alright, so there's little here that hasn't been done in other Doom mods, but what this mod does, it does *very* well indeed. It really does make vanilla Doom feel pedestrian, which isn't much short of amazing.

Basically, if you like Doom, then you have to try this mod. Plus it works with addon-on levels (both Doom 1 and 2). Graphics aside (at the moment this mod won't work with 3D model enabled Doom engines) this is, to me, what Doom 3 should have been.

I had to type up installation instructions for a couple of people, so if you have trouble setting it up then just do this;



1. Make sure you have at least one Doom .wad file (comes with Doom 1, Doom 2, or Ultimate Doom).

2. Download Brutal Doom from http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom (I use BDoomZD_BrutalCompatible_v8.7z)

3. Download GZDoom from http://www.osnanet.de/c.oelckers/gzdoom/download.html (I use gzdoom-bin-1-8-02.zip)

4. Download ZDL (Doom Launcher) from http://zdoom.org/wiki/ZDL (I use ZDL-3.2.2.2-stable.zip)

5. Create a folder on your hard drive (say c:\games\doom) and unzip the three files from steps 2 to 4 into this hard folder). Then copy doom.wad or doom2.wad to this folder.

6. You start ZDL.exe to play Brutal Doom, so you might want to create a shortcut to ZDL.exe on your desktop. Anyway, double click to load ZDL.exe

7. In ZDL, click on settings, then click on 'Add' under the IWAD box to add your Doom .wad from the folder you created in step 5

8. Click on 'Add' under the 'Source ports/engines' box, and select gzdoom.exe

9. Click on 'Main', and click on 'Add' under the "External files" box, and select brutalv018a.pk3

That's it. Just click Launch to play the game, and of course since ZDL saves it's settings then whenever you load it up you just have to click Launch to play.
Post edited by ewgf on
«1

Comments

  • edited August 2013
    ewgf wrote: »

    link broken?

    Tried fiddling with it....nope still broken?

    http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom

    Here's one that works :p

    Which is weird cos' it looks exactly the same?
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited August 2013
    Watched a few vids of it, but haven't had time to download just yet, gonna do it though as I'm now thoroughly sold. I think the video of "Marine" flipping his middle finger at the Cyber Demon is what sold me on it :lol:

    Oh that and the copious amount of gibbing :D
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited August 2013
    Thought this was gonna be an mf doom thread. Am disappoint
  • edited August 2013
    A friend of mine (who usually hates Doom) was telling me about this last week. He said he couldn't get enough of it! I've just had a quick look on Youtube and it looks awesome although I'm not too sure it'll be too playable on my laptop (not that it won't run it but my set up is not ideal for FPS games) but I'll give it a try anyway :-)

    *EDIT* I've got it running! Thanks for the easy to use guide as I'd have been struggling to get it working otherwise. I had to sort the controlls out, but once I'd done that, all runs very well! Norton did recomend that I didn't use Zdl though as it wanted to block it (Norton also refuses to let Taito Type 2x games run either and has a proper hissy fit if I try and run those but as my laptop isn't anywhere near powerful enough, I'm not going to bother with those anymore...it's Street Fighter 4 arcade etc incase you were wondering) but once I'd sorted that out, it's all plain sailing :-)

    I've got Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 tested with the 2 Final Doom wads still to try. It's also worth pointing out that the games are now rock solid and I was unable to get off even the first levels on the 3rd settings. Something I can usually do in my sleep :lol: But I was only playing to test it though...honest ;-)
  • edited August 2013
    looks interesting, but i dont have doom lol, never played it :P
    Professional Mel-the-Bell Simulator................"So realistic, I found myself reaching for the Kleenex King-Size!" - Richard Darling
  • edited August 2013
    link broken?

    Tried fiddling with it....nope still broken?

    http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom

    Here's one that works :p

    Which is weird cos' it looks exactly the same?

    It's not the same. ewgfabcde included the )? in the URL ... I borked it the right way around for him icon14.gif
  • edited August 2013
    ZnorXman wrote: »
    It's not the same. ewgfabcde included the )? in the URL ... I borked it the right way around for him icon14.gif

    I took that out in the quote and it still wouldn't work?
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited August 2013
    I took that out in the quote and it still wouldn't work?

    You took it off the text, but not the hyperlink.
  • edited August 2013
    Looks interesting. Not played Doom in years, and I too wasn't impressed with Doom 3. I'll give this a go at some point, thanks for the heads up.
  • edited August 2013
    guesser wrote: »
    You took it off the text, but not the hyperlink.

    Hmmm....yes! Silly me!
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited August 2013
    looks interesting, but i dont have doom lol, never played it :P

    Seriously? It's one of the all time classic games! If you don't like first person shooters then fair enough, but if you do, then you should track down Doom (or pm me) and play it both with and without the Brutal Doom mod.



    ZnorXman wrote: »
    It's not the same. ewgfabcde included the )? in the URL ... I borked it the right way around for him icon14.gif

    Sorry about that. I was too busy saving humanity from the Hell spawn to worry about a few keystrokes.

    Honestly, next time I'll just let them through the portal...
  • edited August 2013
    ewgf wrote: »
    Seriously? It's one of the all time classic games! If you don't like first person shooters then fair enough, but if you do, then you should track down Doom (or pm me) and play it both with and without the Brutal Doom mod.






    Sorry about that. I was too busy saving humanity from the Hell spawn to worry about a few keystrokes.

    Honestly, next time I'll just let them through the portal...
    i think it was long before i got a pc lol (99 ish)
    Professional Mel-the-Bell Simulator................"So realistic, I found myself reaching for the Kleenex King-Size!" - Richard Darling
  • edited August 2013
    If you missed the DOS era of Personal Computing, then no doubt you wouldn't have played Doom, and many other superb classics from the 1980s and early 1990s. I think PC gaming probably peaked in 1993/94. Once computers booted straight into Windows, it was all over.
  • edited August 2013
    MattLamb wrote: »
    If you missed the DOS era of Personal Computing, then no doubt you wouldn't have played Doom, and many other superb classics from the 1980s and early 1990s. I think PC gaming probably peaked in 1993/94. Once computers booted straight into Windows, it was all over.

    yeah i started with a late win 95 lol
    Professional Mel-the-Bell Simulator................"So realistic, I found myself reaching for the Kleenex King-Size!" - Richard Darling
  • edited August 2013
    MattLamb wrote: »
    If you missed the DOS era of Personal Computing, then no doubt you wouldn't have played Doom

    I imagine a large amount of people on here missed that era :D

    As for never playing Doom the superb (Better than the original PC release) PS1 version was released in 1995 (As were several sub standard heaps of sh*t calling themselves Doom :D).
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited August 2013
    Doom is the reason I failed my A-Levels! Someone installed it (and a shed loads of custom levels) on the 6th form common room PC and that was it for me! They also installed somekind of football game which was pretty good too, but Doom was more popular.

    All you had to put at the C:> prompt was D and Doom would load. Once the extra levels were on you had to type Doom, then Level and the number you wanted to play.
    I remember it was win for Windows :D
  • edited August 2013
    Doom is the reason I failed my A-Levels! Someone installed it (and a shed loads of custom levels) on the 6th form common room PC and that was it for me! They also installed somekind of football game which was pretty good too, but Doom was more popular.

    All you had to put at the C:> prompt was D and Doom would load. Once the extra levels were on you had to type Doom, then Level and the number you wanted to play.
    I remember it was win for Windows :D

    Did those PCs have the atlus prog on them that you typed globe for? PC Globe it was called It was crap :lol:
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited August 2013
    The PS1 version didn't have all the enemies from the PC version though, it didn't have those ones which drained health off you if they could see you?

    The Saturn version was rubbish! What muppet wrote that!!!
    Spoiler:
  • edited August 2013
    The PS1 version didn't have all the enemies from the PC version though, it didn't have those ones which drained health off you if they could see you?

    The Saturn version was rubbish! What muppet wrote that!!!
    Spoiler:

    The Saturn version was pretty crap, but it was worth 5 quid back in 1998, and after playing through a few levels you got accustomed to the rather shoddy gameplay, and it wasn't that bad to play.

    Of course by that I mean I bought it for my Saturn even though I ignored the reviews and hoped it would be good, and when it was a bit ropey I had to play through it for posterity, so obviously I have to try and find something positive to say about it :D
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited August 2013
    The Saturn version was rubbish! What muppet wrote that!!!

    The only game I've ever taken back to the shop! I played it twice (just to check it wasn't a poor load the first time) then took it back the next day and swopped it for Street Fighter Alpha 2. I told the guy that my brother had bought me another copy for my birthday and when he asked why I'd opened it I said "it came like that" (it didn't) just after I traded my copy over someone else bought their copy back too! They guy behind the counter gave me an evil look and said "I'm guessing it's rubbish then?" and I said "yeah, but I don't care now I've got rid of my copy :lol:

    I was actually very disapointed with it and went back to playing the pretty decent SNES version :-)
  • edited August 2013
    The only game I've ever taken back to the shop! I played it twice (just to check it wasn't a poor load the first time) then took it back the next day and swopped it for Street Fighter Alpha 2. I told the guy that my brother had bought me another copy for my birthday and when he asked why I'd opened it I said "it came like that" (it didn't) just after I traded my copy over someone else bought their copy back too! They guy behind the counter gave me an evil look and said "I'm guessing it's rubbish then?" and I said "yeah, but I don't care now I've got rid of my copy :lol:

    I was actually very disapointed with it and went back to playing the pretty decent SNES version :-)

    I've never played the Saturn version, what was wrong with it?
  • edited August 2013
    Hmm, followed your steps, but keep getting this error:
    Execution could not continue.

    File C:/Users/ML/Desktop/Brutal Doom/gzdoom.pk3 is overriding core lump mapinfo/ultdoom.txt.


    I'll keep looking into it.
  • edited August 2013
    I've not played it either.

    It was slow though apparently... Baggers said he was forced to render in the same way as on the PC (basically 1 pixel thick polygon strips) and treat all the engine code as a black box.

    Dunno if he was forced to use floating point maths as well, that would be a killer as well on the Saturn.
  • edited August 2013
    MattLamb wrote: »
    If you missed the DOS era of Personal Computing, then no doubt you wouldn't have played Doom, and many other superb classics from the 1980s and early 1990s. I think PC gaming probably peaked in 1993/94. Once computers booted straight into Windows, it was all over.

    Agree about you say about the peak, and "straight to Win".

    When I saw the first King's Quest game that ran in Windows, I remember thinking to myself that the game was dead.

    Not quite sure what caused it, think it was a mixture of new tech/OS and also developers moving away from "us" 80s gamers. Yeah, they wanted to use the new technology, and yes, with more RAM and using CDs they wanted to cram more in the games but it didn't really blossom the way it could have. Sure, with the advent of CDs you could include speech and such but for the most part, games were terribly lifeless.

    A few exceptions that I remember were Dune, Discworld (NOT Noir, which was sub-par at best), the first Command and Conquer, the first WarCraft but there were so many copycat games that overshot their own goals.
  • edited August 2013
    Brutal Doom wouldn't work on my laptop, but it worked great on my desktop. What a great modification it is to an already superb game. The ability now to look around with the mouse frees the game up beyond recognition. Some nice graphical touches added too.
  • edited August 2013
    ZnorXman wrote: »
    Agree about you say about the peak, and "straight to Win".

    When I saw the first King's Quest game that ran in Windows, I remember thinking to myself that the game was dead.

    Not quite sure what caused it, think it was a mixture of new tech/OS and also developers moving away from "us" 80s gamers. Yeah, they wanted to use the new technology, and yes, with more RAM and using CDs they wanted to cram more in the games but it didn't really blossom the way it could have. Sure, with the advent of CDs you could include speech and such but for the most part, games were terribly lifeless.

    A few exceptions that I remember were Dune, Discworld (NOT Noir, which was sub-par at best), the first Command and Conquer, the first WarCraft but there were so many copycat games that overshot their own goals.

    It's a bit like the 8-bit days before it. Some incredible efforts were made when games still had to be supplied on a handful of 3.5" 1.44mb disks and make use of memory of 8mb if you were lucky. It sounds like a lot compared to the resources available to the Spectrum, but it's all relative.
  • edited August 2013
    My favorite Doom source port is Chocolate Doom. Basically it does the original Doom but in a way that it's trivial to get running on any recent machine, including LAN games, and runs on Mac, OSX, Linux, BSD etc.

    We used Chocolate Doom for the RetroEuskal Doom 20th anniversary tournament this year.
  • edited August 2013
    ewgf wrote: »
    I've never played the Saturn version, what was wrong with it?

    From what I remember it had a very dodgy frame rate and was really choppy and jerky! I also seem to remember that it was highly letter boxed too, only using half the screen! I heard that the conversion was a port of the Playstation version with it's transparincy effects etc which didn't help it.

    My memory isn't too good with it to be honest as I only played it twice before taking it back ;-)
  • edited August 2013
    MattLamb wrote: »
    Brutal Doom wouldn't work on my laptop, but it worked great on my desktop. What a great modification it is to an already superb game. The ability now to look around with the mouse frees the game up beyond recognition. Some nice graphical touches added too.

    There are Doom engine ports that offer mouse up and down, and other features, but aren't demanding of the host machine - many of the ports were made years ago, and so used the very slow (as compared to today's machines) PCs of the time. Have a look at

    http://www.doomworld.com/classicdoom/ports/

    though I don't know how up to date the list is. One version I remembered is JDoom*, which gives mouse look, 3D model support, and nowadays should run on anything. There's a download from

    http://download.cnet.com/Doom-Jdoom-package/3000-7441_4-10266567.html

    (probably best if you click on "Direct Download Link" otherwise you'll have to install some waste of space download installer for the website). If you want to try this then

    1. download the file and unzip it's contents to a temporary folder

    2. install deng-inst-1.7.14.exe

    if you're prompted for the locations of your Doom wads then point the program towards them. You don't need separate wads for each Doom installation, you can point JDoom towards the wads in any other Doom installation on your PC

    3. install jDoom_Resource_Pack_101.exe to the directory that you installed deng-inst-1.7.14.exe

    4. run the Doomsday Kickstart shortcut to start Doomsday Kickstart

    5. In Doomsday Kickstart, click on Games, then on Add'ons, then put a tick next to Doom Resource Pack (this enables the 3D models).

    6. Alter anything else you like, then select the game you want (Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, etc) and click Play.

    7. In Doom, go to the control options to alter the keys, select mouse look, etc.

    However, I think the mouse look in Jdoom is cosmetic more than anything, as I think the game still compensates your aim vertically.





    * It was called JDoom, but the name changed to Doomsday, hence the shortcut name being 'Doomsday Kickstart". Later versions of Doomsday, with more features are available, but you didn't say your laptop's specs, so I don't know what will run on it.

    http://dengine.net/doom
  • edited August 2013
    Cheers, will take a look at some point. The laptop specs are pretty good and modern (6gb RAM, Intel Core i3 and Windows 7). I think it was a problem with how I set things up that stopped Brutal Doom working.

    Thanks for the links! :)
Sign In or Register to comment.