i think it’s fair to conclude that both titles have generated some pretty awful children
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that’s true. the success of Doom did vastly transform the industry, some would say for the worse. i think that has less to do with Doom per se than just where things were heading generally though. the substantial Doom modding scene is really what pushes it over the edge for me. in addition to Doom just being this like… kind of pure unfiltered expression of id.
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Yeah this matchup is Id vs Super ego, at least on paper
Doom is a childish power fantasy with great execution ; it’s why you play videogames, shamefully
Katamari, in contrast, is the proper videogame you show to your family
But in practice I find Katamari at least comparable to Doom on a primitive level (rolling up a cat feels as good as shooting the shotgun and Katamari doesn’t have Looking for Keycards, Being Bored) so there’s no comparison. Vote for Katamari
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They’re both games about exploring sprawling levels, destroying everything in your path with ruthless efficiency, all while maintaining a charmingly childlike sense of humor.
So in that sense, I can’t decide.
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Growing up with super religious parents, only one of these games was worth getting grounded for and losing my mortal soul over.
But then, in thinking about however much value there is in offending/being tasteless/joining the deviant ranks of incipient rock n roll, underground comics and midnight movies in the cultural imagination, I remembered that Tommy Tallarico video where he’s losing his shit about Katamari. And how many assholes like that were/are offended that the game “looks gay” or is “too weird” or “for babies”?
idk. Both these games rule. I like DOOM more but maybe in the spirit of the new voting twist I’ll wait and see if I can be swayed.
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has anything successful not
(legitimate question, i would be interested to have an example to study)
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Doom is a fucking miracle. The speed, the atmosphere, the art direction…it blew everything out of the water in 1993. Doom is such an incredible game that when I played it as a teen in 2004, it punched my brain with it’s energy and aesthetics. I’d had a GameCube for two years! I’d played Jedi Knight II! Doom’s graphics should have been this antiquated old thing by gaming trends but it was so vibrant and all engaging that I just couldn’t ignore it.
Doom’s base game feels huge in a way level based games just can’t anymore. So many levels change the entire feel of the game. There is such a personal touch from each of the level authors, it feels extremely personal, extremely expressive.
I think it’s notable that when I think of games that remind me of doom, Thief, Uru and Gone Home come to mind more than Call of Duty. Doom might have launched the FPS genre but it’s real legacy is the level design, the sense of pacing and space, that transcends the shooting.
Not that you even needed to transcend it, it’s still the best feeling FPS ever made.
The violence of doom only feels uninteresting now because everybody wanted a piece of the ultra violent pie after it. Nothing had ever looked like doom before, at least, not in a video game. It’s a heavy metal album come to life on screen…and yet it’s edgy in the fun way. Demons gushing blood and pentagrams scare people but aren’t about hurting gays, aren’t about being racist, aren’t about being a cop. There are shitty people who like it, sure, but the same is true of katamari, it’s just different shitty people.
Doom makes me want to make games. Doom makes me remember why I love video games. Katamari is cute and exuberant but…it’s weird how much it’s never grabbed me. I understand what makes it cool but I instantly understood it, doom has surprised me for years and people keep exploring what doom can even be. Katamari figured itself out and…stopped. It’s fine that it’s what it is, but…it’s only that. Doom is what it is, but also it’s so many things that it didn’t start out as too.
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in Doom I feel like I’m fighting the enemies, in Katamari Damacy I feel like I’m fighting the level designer. reductive, but I’m here to fight the machine and I have no bone to pick with Keita Takahashi.
Karamari feels like an enormous impressive balloon sculpture, Doom is a firework display
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namco europe put katamari damacy on a trailer reel of upcoming pal releases then they never released it here
doom always looks so cool
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i’m digging those chinese style lanterns but the buildup of identical camera-facing corpse sprites is pretty comical
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I like reading y’all talk about Doom’s feel and vibe because it doesn’t work for me. Kinesthetically the movement, camera, sound design, etc. all tend to take me out of the game. Shooting doesn’t feel like I’m clicking to fire a projectile so much as rolling a die to see if I timed the cursor correctly. This is the underpinning of most shooters, of course, but the sleight of hand never captivates me. The movement and head bob also feel wrong like my avatar is on a gimbal attached to a reciprocating saw on an RC car.
Katamari Damacy is an anti-Doom in one particular way — it is designed around the features and limitations of one particular machine and controller. Namco should sell a DualShock 2 with composite video and mono audio out that runs Katamari Damacy. The textures and models are a last hurrah for dithering as an aesthetic tool. The music really ties the whole thing together. The controls are tuned just so to set a constant rhythm of brief frustration followed by delight in execution - a kinder QWOP, like learning to actively use your weaker digits on a musical instrument.
First-person mouse-and-keyboard PC games are by far my preference for action games in the last decade and Doom is without a doubt the seminal work. I also deeply admire the culture of porting Doom and Wolf 3D, modding, etc. But none of it resonates with me at all. The experience of playing Doom doesn’t hold a candle to Katamari for me.
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This is wild to me because Doom’s auto-aim is so absurdly generous, it’s one of those things I wish future shooters would go back to, a lack of concern with being good at shooting and a greater interest in every other part of the classic ego-shooter: big twisty dungeons with traps and locked doors where staying still is costly.
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do you actually find it unpleasant to play for a time or simply not engaging? i felt similarly cold on it for a long while but this may have in fact been attributed to a low level motion sickness; i’ve found that the Smooth Doom mod (adding in-between frames to the animations) made it a fair bit easier on the senses
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Oh, no, I mean it’s too permissive. We almost always say “die roll” to mean a punishingly low probability but here it’s too apparent that the math is forgiving. I don’t feel like I can miss if I’m in the vicinity. I live for the satisfaction of crits in e.g. Bungie games - shooting an alien’s head is fun but shooting the hand holding their shield or their rebreather tank, etc. is way more fun to me. Halo and Destiny also have generous aim assist but it’s happening primarily through reticle stickiness rather than generous bullet magnetism/spread. I can see your tastes here and that’s cool but it necessarily doesn’t serve my technical fantasy. (I’m weirdly attached to this - holding onto decent mouseaim precision and wpm for dear life as the foxdie starts hitting differently.)
Actually unpleasant. I’ve turned off the bob and messed around with FOV and mappings but the movement still feels bad to me. There are pieces of the illusion I’m used to that are missing, I think, like sound design around movement, momentum in and out of turns, and so on.
It’s kind of like Outrun vs. Outrun 2 in that way - I prefer the handling when you’ve started to simulate the weight transfer across the wheels, etc. but some people might like the more pure gamey handling.
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Ah, yeah, I’m completely exhausted by picking the right cluster of pixels to click on, as that has become the default model since the 00s and I just want to blow up demons, hadn’t even considered that folks actually like that stuff (which, of course, is completely legit, it’s just so outside what I enjoy)
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It’s like hitting perfects in a rhythm game or drifting around a corner perfectly. Much sharper when it’s not a full-auto weapon - a Halo DMR or Destiny hand cannon has the satisfaction of well-executed snipes with a fraction of the effort and risk.
I should have written more about Katamari! I just have more intense impressions from things I don’t like
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select button
I just have more intense impressions from things I don’t like
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Hi every post I ever made about That Game.
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Oh good, I’m not the only one.
Totally acknowledge Doom is a big deal influential game or whatever, but admittedly it is a big deal in a space I don’t care for (PC gaming), and every time I have tried to give it a chance, I have left the session profoundly bored and disgusted with its aesthetic. It’s not for me, and I would rather vote for the game I actually frequently feel like playing instead of something more impactful on the games industry that I never want to play.
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I think part of the key of Doom’s appeal to me is the memories of taking hours to download the shareware version over a modem, and getting in on This Is The Next Wolfenstein by doing that, and then people sharing around floppies of it. It’s impossible for me as a person to divide myself from that, and for a long time, it was impossible for me to think of playing Doom with more than just the keyboard (this has changed now, but yeah).
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